We went to PAX East and had a great time (April 2026)

30 Apr, 2026

Also other games what we have played and that and material on the AYN Thor downgrade. Also the Wii for some reason, oop, (the reason is that it’s the best console ever.)

I have a cold that I’m fairly sure I picked up at PAX East, but having gone to PAX East, I've also caught VIDEO GAME FEVER. I’m writing this in the Cambridge, Massachusetts Public Library, where some youths are loudly swearing and being homophobic around some multiplayer video game and nobody at the desk is doing anything even though they are being the way that they are right by the desk and the staff can definitely hear them. If I write about games I can momentarily forget that people this embarrassing exist.

We’re going to talk about PAX, but also some of the games we played not at PAX that we may or may not have been induced to play by our day at PAX (we went for a day, that’s important). And also I’ll get on the blower about tech minimalism again, because it wouldn’t be a Capitalist Overlord Raccoons issue without me doing that.

Anyway, here are some games and tech thoughts before we get into the PAX East stuff. It makes sense narratively. Mostly. Does it matter? No.

WarioWare: Mega Party Games (Nintendo, 2003, Nintendo GameCube)

Beyond the improvements to the sound and what I’m 99% sure are a few new microgames, the big thing here are competitive multiplayer modes that are whole games with their own objectives and strategies played out through playing microgames against others; one after the other, or simultaneously.

On our latest trip, Margaret and I got a lot of value out of 9-Volt’s stage, a card-collecting game where players draw GBA E-reader cards from decks (fucken love the tie-in, especially from the perspective of now, when all these gubbins are so long ago), until someone draws the play card and plays for X number of drawn cards by playing X number of microgames, accelerating in speed and increasing in difficulty as the sequence goes on. If you mess up, the cards you’re playing for, plus those that you’ve already earned, go into a Free Parking-from-monopoly-esque deck. And then if you’re all colossally shit like we were, you end up playing a single tie-breaker at the end for all the cards.

All of the multiplayer stages, that are essentially board games (others are about inflating a balloon, or placing marbles in a grid that’s in outer space for some reason), are like that, in that they can be won or lost on a dime, in moments of pushed luck or lapsed attention. All the new modes are conducive to taking the manic energy and frantic focus of the original concept and turning it into an infuriating, bastarding, brilliant, one-of-a-kind group activity. It’s fantastic. I look forward to getting netplay on the go in Dolphin so that Margaret and I can play it across continents.

Bishi Bashi Special (Konami, 2000, Sony PlayStation)

Microgames, but violently Japanese in theme and tone, to the point that I’m impressed and also really glad that this got a European release. Actually a compilation of two Bishi Bashi games if you play the PAL version, so this is one of the handful of times you want to be playing a PAL version of a game over an NTSC version in this day and age.

We liked this. It was my suggestion because I’d seen it mentioned online and it sounded up our alley given our recent WarioWare obsession. It’s less immediately fast-paced because they stop after every game to tell you the controls for the next one. In a way that’s good, because you’re not flailing around figuring each game out, but there’s also less momentum in it as a result. Are the tutorials skippable? That's a question for you; we didn’t work that out. Great review.

This was second fiddle to Mega Party Games on our trip, and a considerable part of that is that Bishi Bashi has round robins and tournament setups, and you play more of the games directly against other people, which is all good, but WarioWare has a cheeky chunky boyo for a mascot, novel multiplayer modes that make the console re-release worth it even if you own the original, and the one word prompts for stages are weirdly exciting. Yeah, that does go against what I just wrote in the last paragraph about sometimes not knowing what to do, but you can’t make a perfect micro-game collection, evidently.

WarioWare doesn’t have you playing games directly against other people for most of the time, and Bishi Bashi Special has all of that in spades. It’s not that one game is better than the other, but more that that different games are better for different days, moods, and groups.

There’s also three buttons in play which makes it more button mashy and frantic and harder to co-ordinate yourself at speed than WarioWare. That was good fun with another person, but on my own I felt a bit frustrated with my own dexterity. But then my dexterity is awful, and your mileage will probably vary.

It’s good!

If you’re emulating this, familiarize yourself with the mappings you have for square, cross, and circle, especially if you’re unfamiliar with PlayStation controller layouts, because those are the buttons you’ll need. We ran into this and it was a mild pain for Margaret, who isn’t a PlayStation user. The peril of emulation, I suppose.

The AYN Thor will outlive me, plus what it’s like to set up for multiplayer

The Ayn Thor has been dropped onto the carpet. The Ayn Thor has had an SD card inserted upside down because the slot is upside down for some reason but there’s no indication of that. The Ayn Thor has been opened up because its owner is weirdly hypochondriac about it. It’s me, I’m the owner, and I have done these things. Despite me being clumsy beyond belief, the Thor is in perfect working and physical condition. There are neuro-divergents (including me) who might agonize over the hinge, but the reality is that the Thor is built to last unless you deliberately cunt it into your kitchen wall; I take good care of it with the exception of the above genuine accidents, so I have not done that.

I had a bit of a scare installing ROCKNIX on the Thor which then meant that Android wasn’t booting on it. It happened because the ROCKNIX developers were shipping a bugged bootloader with their ‘image burner’ application, and then when I reverted everything and tried ROCKNIX, I didn’t find much that it could do over stock Android 13.¹

You don’t miss out on much; Android is even doing Xbox emulation now (source: I saw this on Bluesky, and things have moved on a fair bit from the T-posing Jedi that the Xemu fork was managing early on), and PS3 emulation continues to get there. RPCS3 on ROCKNIX can’t currently play digital games, and crashed before gameplay in the one disc game, Facebreaker, that I did want to play, so that was that. Linux is great, but ROCKNIX on the Thor, as of very recently, did not improve my life in any way, and created more issues than it was worth (Wifi and Bluetooth connectivity would not always work, and there were visual glitches in the interface). For now, the AYN Thor does best on Android.

In capturing the enthusiast imagination, the Thor has ensured a steady stream of interest in developing software specifically for it. Game console-like frontend Cocoon used to be a battery-guzzling, buggy thing, and now it’s supposed to be less of those things. I’ve gone back to using the default Android home menu, Quickstep, though, and it’s fine. I may test out the new version, we’ll see. I really do think that default Android, plus maybe KDE Connect for when you’re plugged into a TV, is enough.

Ah yes, connecting to a TV, and docking in general. It's a pain if you don’t come prepared. Get KDE Connect, or a media center keyboard, because a fair few application user interfaces have buttons and menus inaccessible using a controller, which isn’t the case for SteamOS and Linux apps launched with Steam Input. It took one night of struggling with using a controller in the Android interface on my visit to Margaret before digging out the keyboard. Once we did that, we had a great time. We were able to search for and watch videos online, and set up controllers in the Dolphin emulator with relative ease. We played a whole lot of WarioWare: Mega Party Games that way.

It is mind-boggling that a games console that once was a chunky cube with a handle on it is now playable on a device that can live in a pocket. The Thor is small enough that you don’t even really need to give it a dedicated spot under the television. We brought a USB-C Dock to the hotel room and all the gear sat behind the screen. We had a nice time and, after that first night where we figured out the setup, I stopped thinking about the setup, and the game was the focus; it was game console-like, and this is after I uninstalled Cocoon.

For now, I’m enjoying playing games as opposed to getting bogged down in customization. There’s an allure to what Cocoon offers, and I’m not knocking those who are super into theming their frontends, but I think that, after my ROCKNIX fiasco, and the wonkiness of earlier Cocoon builds, I’m alright.

Wii Sports (Nintendo, 2006, Nintendo Wii)

I thought that BACKLOG YEAR was going in a Game Boy Advance direction, and it still may, but, after coming back home and deciding that I didn’t feel under the weather, I decided on a whim to boot up the Wii.

Wii Sports is still the apex of gaming going “””””””””mainstream””””””””, and the apex of motion controls being good and accessible and intuitive. The original Wii Sports with 2006, pre-Motion Plus peripheral Wii remotes, controls better than Nintendo Switch Sports with the Joy-Con. The tennis is better, the bowling is better. It’s more accurate, and easier to grasp, and still a great game of Tennis, or whatever. I had a lovely afternoon on just the tennis; it’s absolutely weapons grade. I like that it’s low dexterity, and here the simplicity makes it so that I, with all of my dexterity issues, can be competitive at it.

There’s no online, but there was Wii Sports Club, a remake for the dropped-like-a-stone Wii U, that offered that. I should get that on the go. I’ve always been happy enough with the AI opponents and literally anyone who wants to play, which, because Wii Sports is so simple and obvious, has always been literally anyone. Margaret told me the other day that the heyday of the Wii is the only time someone asked her to play Mario Kart, and that has rollicked around in my brain ever since, because it’s so indicative of where games went and where they’ve retreated to in the subsequent twenty years. Days argon.

Wii Fit Plus (Nintendo, 2009 Nintendo Wii)

Boston Burger Company is a chain of restaurants known for its monthly specials and monstrosity milkshakes. April’s was a chocolate cake built on top of a vanilla milkshake, and it was so good, we shared it twice. The first time I went in, I had a confetti cake milkshake all to myself and didn’t eat for twenty-four hours. So, as you might imagine, I’ve been thinking of creative ways to burn calories. Thus, my excavation of the Wii Balance Board.

It’s amazing how well Wii Fit (originally released in 2007 and then re-released with more training activities later, as above) still works in current year. Like Wii Sports, it’s aimed at people who, up until 2005, had to be tricked into playing video games by Rumpelstiltskin, and thrives on being something that even a chimp could play. A lot of the Yoga activities are lost on me, but the step aerobics, hula-hooping and and balance training ones are things that even I can get involved in. Today, the day that I’m writing this, I had a good half-hour on all of the above and, though they took chunks out of me, I’m going to see if I can keep it up as a habit.

Once more, Wii Fit absolutely mogs more recent attempts at recapturing the magic, although someone with a different disability to mine may disagree. I’m dogshit with my hands, so Ring Fit Adventure was never going to be for me, even though it goes even harder on gamifying exercise by turning it into a light role-playing game and that does sound good. I can’t speak for the durability of the Ring Fit peripheral, but the Wii Balance Board has been in the house for 19 years and it works just as well as the day we got it. It could survive a nuclear attack, which is nice, given everything.

It always seems a bit trite to read that games are being introduced into classrooms and therapy spaces; there’s the question of ‘how effective can they really be?’ But I can confirm that Wii Fit was prescribed to me as physical therapy as a child, and I’m still upright, so there you are.

Wii Thor Art Thou (or, Wii emulation)

Not every game on the Wii is accessible to me, with one hand. Wii Sports’ boxing, despite having the best music out of all the activities, needs the Nunchuk. Any game that requires the Nunchuk, which tended to be games that also appeared on other consoles and used most if not all of the buttons on a regular controller, were out for me, at least on a level of me being consistently good at and not causing me physical agony. Super Mario Galaxy’s Switch ports have made the game playable on proper controllers, but for the longest time, it was attempting to approximate the controls in the Dolphin emulator that made that game, or any other game with cockpit-tier controls, available to me. Mario Kart Wii is a good example; I never had a GameCube controller at the time and made do with the Wii Remote only controls, which meant that I only had the dexterity to drive automatic, without drifting and mini-turbos. Even now, I prefer to emulate that game because putting tricks on D-pad-up on a GameCube controller is hard for me, and Dolphin means I can map tricks and drifting to the same button and/or trigger, like in Mario Kart 8. It’s also just easier to load classic controller Riivolution patches (like the ones for Super Mario Galaxy) in Dolphin than it is to fuddle around with Riivolution on a proper Wii.

Using real Wii peripherals on an emulator woah Dave

The Mayflash Dolphinbar makes hooking up real Wii peripherals to an emulator easy, no matter what platform you’re on, including Linux and Android. If you still have all the bullshit in a drawer somewhere, getting Wii emulation (with cranked up graphics, depending on your device) on the go, with patches and fan mods, is a good shout. You can also just use your Wiimote as a mouse on your computer, which is a cost-effective way of doing lightgun games, a ‘spend a little and if you like it, spend a lot’ precursor to going out and getting a Sinden Lightgun. I haven’t tried doing the Wiimote-lightgun set-up with something like Time Crisis in a PlayStation 1 emulator, but I have done it with a mod for the PC version of House of the Dead III (Wow Entertainment, 2002, Arcade, PC, PS3, Xbox, with endearingly wonky Japanese to English-translation and voice acting) that turns it into the arcade version. You might ask why bother with that, and the answer is that I’m shit at it and need the infinite continues that don’t come with the dedicated Wii port. Anyway, minus the lack of pump action for the shotgun you carry in-game, the Wii Remote-as-mouse set-up with the game is just about arcade perfect. I am the sort of financially irresponsible moron who would buy a Sinden, but it looks big and heavy and everyone in the demonstration videos holds it with two hands. They should make a one-hand version of it, but until that happens, I’m making do with this.

Wii emulation is brilliant. The AYN Thor fits in your pocket and plays Wii games, and you can plug in a sensor bar wherever you like and it’s a portable Wii that knocks the graphical socks off of the original. This is the future.

Ah but is it, ahhhhhhh, no not ah, ahhhhhhhh

They’ve just put the price up of the Thor and the Odin 3, and announced that, due to memory shortages, they’re downgrading the memory from UFS (Universal Flash Storage) 4.0 to 3.1 in future batches. In practical terms, this might not affect games that are running (although I would be interested to see how Steam games fare when this comes in), but it’s going to impact data transfers, i.e. putting games and apps and whatever you want on the thing, and battery life, because my understanding is that UFS 3.1 is less battery efficient. So I’m conscious now that my Thor son is now genuinely irreplaceable. Nothing must ever happen to him.

I’ve been a little hypochondriac about him; I’m going to reiterate that that the SD cards go in upside down, so that you don’t do what I do and accidentally put one in the ‘right’ way and kill the card. (The port itself is fine.) Also what you shouldn’t do is try and open it up to remove it, and forget the plastic picker thing that lets you take the back off, and then make the shell loose, and have to take it to your partner for them to properly take off the back with the plastic picker thing, and then screw it back on. Margaret has the patience of a saint.

And don’t panic about give in the right-side of the screen; what you should do instead is go onto the AYN Discord and search for the issue, and find a delightfully maternal message that starts with ‘don’t stress about this’, and tells you that the give is normal, and actually stopping the screen from snapping off. My Thor is still in one piece and I’m a clumsy idiot, so you, a presumably normal person, should be fine.

If I didn’t already have a Thor following price rises amid [gestures weakly] I’d probably leave it, and I’m an impulsive giblet, so that’s a sign of how badly [gestures weakly] is impacting the hardware side of tech enthusiasm. It’s an infuriating arse-ache that corpse-era capitalism shepherded by mirthless vat-grown baby-men is making the best emulation device running Android that you can buy (and so many other devices, including the Nintendo Switch 2 or the Valve Steam Deck) non-viable even at the production level. The Ford Model T was once the height of affordable mass production at both the production and consumer level. What are we doing?

Tech minimalism update / Linux evangelism

I think the current state of hardware shortages depressing me is why I’m getting shot of the Steam Deck OLED. I need less doohickeys in my life, and the Legion Go does everything that the Deck does, but with a bigger screen and a more capable APU that seems preferable, in these harried times, to an OLED screen. I do like OLED screens, but the AYN Thor has two of them, so I’m not missing out.

I don’t think that the Steam Deck has given Linux mass appeal. It’s still an enthusiast’s device. But, it has gotten me, a video game enthusiast, into Linux. I almost, kind of, sort of on a good day, know what I’m doing. Remember when you had to engage with the computer to make brrr the computer? Linux is that. Things can go wrong, but you have more agency to fix those things versus Windows’ ‘uwu, a thing went wrong and we won’t tell you what or why because we, the corporation, view you, the end user, as a goo-goo-gaga baby, thus making your goo-goo-gaga-babyness a self fulfilling prophecy’.

Since this paragraph was written, I have encountered one issue on my Bazzite install and two issues on Margaret’s that I’ve either been able to fix or understand enough to know what to do to work around quirks of the operating system. Technology was a mistake, BUT Linux encourages me to think and to probe, whereas Windows wants me to outsource thought to a large language model while telling me nothing about what’s gone wrong. The simplification of Computer, The, and Internet, The, for it to be bled dry by corporations is why a significant portion of the human populace are insane, stupid, or both. Blow up The Internet and the computer. Bring back having to engage with your technology, so that the worst people you know, and your two-year-old son, log off, and maybe become not the worst people you know.

Skin Deep (Blendo Games, 2025, PC)

An ‘immersive sim’ in which you’re a space insurance agent rescuing space cats from space pirates. The ‘immersive sim’ label here means that there’s a dedicated spit button and that you can interact with and put in your inventory with most things in the environment to solve puzzles and navigate enemy formations however you see fit.

I bought this on sale this month, so it’s not exactly BACKLOG YEAR, but I’m clinging to what Margaret said on this point: having BACKLOG YEAR as a rule, even if not a hard and fast one, is helping me be more discerning about the games that I do decide to take a punt on.

I went for this for the space theme and the immersive elements that seem a cut above other im-sims; dusty vents can make you sneeze; if you go into a rubbish chute to leave the ship you’re on (the whole thing is that you re-capture ships that pirates have boarded), you’re a stinky-brinky and the pirates can smell you; you can get glass in your feet. It’s neat. It’s also published by Annapurna Interactive, which is nearly always a marker for quality.

I never went for Deus Ex or System Shock, but I did get massively into Heat Signature, also broadly an immersive sim, to the point of writing one long, effusive review for here. And I suppose Dishonored as well, that was good.

Skin Deep is a proper good im-sim. I’ve been re-watching a lot of the Daniel Craig James Bond films recently, and I’m noticing that the espionage tone and vibe in this game is super strong. I also want to say that the TITLE DROP THEME TUNE (it’s good) is the developers taking direct notes from the Bond film franchise.

There’s not a lot of shooting in it thus far, although I have been shot at a lot. The combat is challenging, almost like Hitman in that you can engage in it, but it’s not advisable. I’m enjoying sneaking around to disable all the ship systems so that I can sneak around more. Maybe there’ll be a bit where I find a seeker grenade, throw it through an unsealed window into the bridge, and kill four people, which is cool, but not going overboard with it. There’s a sense of danger and trepidation to the combat, and I’m thrilled with touches like having to remove bullets and the heat-seeking ‘swordfish’ robots from your body when they’re inside you,

It’s a game in the first-person perspective, but not a shooter in the Call of Duty sense. The last session I was in I got a tutorial to use guns, so that may be about to change, but so far all that has been non-existent. I haven’t even figured out how to pick up the guns of the pirates that I kill, if that’d even a thing; you’d think so? Nina, the main character, carries a silenced pistol in the hero art on Steam, so I am expecting even more spy hijinks soon.*

Update: Guns have been introduced, but ammo is in short supply. I might fire six or seven shots in a level, at most. The ammo conservation side of things makes things quite tense, closer to something like the early Resident Evil games.

I did enjoy how involved the gun tutorial was, with one eye on realism despite the game itself being rooted in science-fiction. You reload manually. You cock the gun manually. You drop magazines that are real world physics objects that you can pick back up. That kind of thing is what to expect from games that anoraks like me describe as ‘immersive sims’. I don’t even really know what that means, but I’ve started to take it to mean that there are minute details of that nature wrapped up in the mechanics.

I’ve got about 12 hours on this and I’ve only done... 7 levels? It’s one of those games that initially you have no idea what you’re doing, but the basic concept is interesting enough that you prattle around until the systems start making sense. I’ve been reloading saves but also restarting levels completely after faffing about for forty-five minutes and going ‘oh, THAT’S what I’m supposed to do’. It’s good value. A game that I’m going to finish, in all likelihood.

The plot is bobbins, but that also works with the game’s irreverent tone. I’m treating the narrative as silly and not important, having just got to a(the first?) major twist and going ‘oh, going there is it’. It’s window dressing for smashing blokes into walls and dropping their heads down bins into space; secondary to the mechanics, which are brilliant. So, plot, bobbins (complimentary).

There is one recurring bug (on Linux using Proton?) that gets on my nerves when it happens, but it doesn’t happen often enough to stop me from playing. I’m mostly playing it on the Legion Go, on Proton 11, and more than once I’ve jumped and accidentally no-clipped into a vent that I’ve had no way to get out of because I hadn’t disarmed the vent fusebox yet. That was a ‘I’ll start over’ situation.

I like the anthropomorphic cat stuff. Some of the voice acting on the cats is delightfully silly. I like that it has an 80s aesthetic with the terminal in the hub base and cassettes that you can find in the levels but that are also very well hidden because I haven’t found any of them at all yet. Skin Deep is cohesive; the immersive mechanics, the fusion of realistic 80s technology and bollocks science-fiction technology, and the overwhelming silliness but also squeanmish realism of the violence and the physics add up into something that I keep playing. It’s a delight.

I am so bad at this but even though my progress has slowed to a crawl I'm having a great time playing around in the level that I'm trying to beat. The stealth mechanics are strong stuff; robust and hard to cheese. There was one point where I got shot (read: with a gun) out of an air lock, and I was presumed dead. All the best I’m-sims involve defenestration. Skin Deep is excellent.

Capitalist Overlord Raccoons at Pax East 2026

PAX was last week to me writing this but not to you reading this. Having never been to a PAX, or any video game exposition before, I was expecting to see some games that were coming out soon, but it’s a lot, lot more than that. So, Dr. Margaret Downs PhD. and I are going to talk about some of the games that we played and/or saw that looked interesting, but first, Margaret presents some of the alternative things that we saw.

Margaret Downs on events on the Sunday at PAX East 2026

One of the first things Chief Raccoon and I did was stop into the Adaptive Gaming Freeplay room, run by an organization called Open the Gates. I’m not disabled myself, but I’m always looking for ways that Chief Raccoon and other disabled gamers can play more games. We played Pianista, a rhythm game that fell firmly into the category of “extremely my shit” as someone who took piano lessons for over a decade. They had set up a Microsoft Adaptive Controller with Logitech buttons that could be positioned however was most comfortable. Then we went over to a station with Untitled Goose Game, which I’ve been meaning to play forever, and it was as chaotic as advertised. The initial setup was with a joystick that I found a bit hard to control, but we switched to a device a lot like a Wii Nunchuk and found it much easier. Both were alongside the same buttons as earlier. I left the room glad that people with tons of experience (both industrial and lived) are working on making gaming more accessible, and excited to help in whatever way I could.

From there, we went to a live taping of It Takes A Village, a podcast neither of us had ever heard of, but we went because the description sounded cool and I for one will absolutely be listening more. Host and actor Samantha Beart interviewed actor and writer Jasmine Bhullar about their experiences in games, and I was deeply moved as Jasmine talked about video games and comics as a way to bridge language and cultural barriers. Jasmine’s take on comics as political made a lot of things click in my head; I grew up in an environment that tended to shy away from “difficult” topics and I always felt like I was going to get in some kind of trouble for engaging with anything remotely subversive or edgy. It’s taken me time even as an adult to be open to the messages from different kinds of media and allow myself to feel seen by them. They also mentioned Fading Echo [which Beart has a voice role in], which we were fortunate enough to see demoed later in the day and seems extremely exciting. It wasn’t lost on me that everyone I saw on panels about this game fell into the category of “femmes and thems,” to quote Beart.

Me on being tempted to buy every thing at every stall

We passed lots of retro game shop stalls and I mercifully didn’t make any stupid purchases. But I was and am delighted that I can to one of the people running a stall and ask them whether they have WarioWare: Twisted² and they can say no but also know what I’m talking about. It’s Disneyland for dorks and I am here for it. I did buy a Dreamcast t-shirt from the Limited Run Games stall and the non-GM variant rulebook for a TTRPG called Teatime Adventures; I’ve never really played a tabletop thing, but the art and concept seems very Beatrix Potter-coded and I’m looking forward to having a go at it with Margaret. Margaret bought a tabletop rulebook called Time Tales as a gift; it as described to us as ‘Doctor Who but with cat ears’, and I’m considering buying my own copy based on that snippet alone.

Disney says that Disneyland is the happiest place on Earth. It’s not, it’s PAX East. I loved going around being sold things like a mug.

Games we played or saw at PAX East that looked neat

Pianista (Superb Corp. 2016-18, iOS/Android, Nintendo Switch)

Margaret mentioned it earlier, but since the Access Gaming Lounge visit was for my benefit, I’ll add that Pianista (not actually a new game) was a very cool mental addition to our ‘turning single-player games into co-op ones’ routine. I had no idea this game existed but it’s the first game that has made me interested in purchasing a co-piloting setup. I’ve always liked the Guitar Hero / Rock Band flavor of rhythm games, but I’ve never been very good at them, and this was the first time where I didn’t feel as though I was at odds with a game of that type.

Open the Gates’ Access Gaming Lounge is a big part of why we loved this year’s PAX as much as we did, so much so that I’m trying to get involved with Open the Gates as an excuse to go back next year for more days. Sharing knowledge about adaptive controllers is an exciting prospect too, oop.

Margaret’s first impressions of Fishbowl (imissmyfriends.studio, 2026, PC, PS5)

Unsurprisingly for me as the proprietor of the Cozy Corner, my list is mostly cozy-seeming indie games. One of the first ones I saw was Fishbowl, which advertises itself as a “narrative game about dreams, grief, and hope.” Based on the demo, it feels like Spiritfarer but with Stardew Valley-esque graphics. I'm very excited to delve in, with the knowledge that I'll need to care for myself as someone who recently lost her grandmother.

Me on Fishbowl

A role-playing game about the drudgery of modern life and wishing for better things. The demo was chockful of adulthood ennui, dreamscapes, and the specific taste of ‘take me back to when I was younger and people I love were alive and life was basically good’ nostalgia that feels comfortable, but also uncomfortably familiar. Is it a cosy game? Maybe. But there are also some Very Special Episode moments in it. Anyway, it’s out now, and Margaret bought it, so you may well hear more about it from her in the near future.

You can get this in a Steam bundle with Venba (2023, Visai Games, NS, PC, PS, XB), a short narrative puzzler about Indian immigrants to Canada embracing their culture through family recipes with their son as he grows up there. I found it super evocative of that experience, and the family storyline pulled me along to finish it in one sitting. It’s easy to get lost in the lives of those characters, be upset for them when bad things happen to them, and root for their successes. This got mentioned at the It Takes a Village recording as a strong example of writing culture authentically, so you know I’m onto something when I say it's worth a go.

THROWBACK JAI ALAI HEROES (Astro Crow, couldn’t immediately divine the year this was actually commercially released but it’s currently in production, Arcade-exclusive)

An arcade-exclusive game rendition of the sport Jai-Alai, a sport which I had no idea about until now but is apparently big in Florida, where Astro Crow is based. The arcade-exclusive part is both fascinating and bizarre, something that I both love and hate. We saw the cabinet and were like ‘oh cute they packaged their pixel-art, crunchy- sounding Steam game (because it was OBVIOUSLY going to be a Steam game) in a cabinet, but no, that is the release mechanism they’re going for.

Margaret and I co-piloted against (and got absolutely binned by) a stranger, and had a great time. It’s so colorful. My big note is that arcade controls (a stick plus buttons) are not that accessible to me as a hemiplegic person, and I should maybe contact them about that. Okay, I’ve now done that, so we’ll see where it goes.

Someone at PAX decided to take the cabinet home with them, to live in a ‘private office’ in Boston. I’m simultaneously very happy for the developers but also miffed that it’s going to live in a private space; where I (or anyone, but most importantly me) can’t play it. Margaret and I have been lobbying Boston arcade Versus (mentioned on here in glowing terms before; staffed by the nicest people possible) to buy it. We can’t buy it, but we are in there a lot, and the manager, a nice lady called Kelly, said that she would pass on the details to the people above her. We've done what we can.

It’s at once neat and annoying that this might be the first new arcade-exclusive title in many moons. You can count the number of publicly available cabinets in one hand - and abandon all hope of playing this if you’re not in the US. Give us a home version, you shits. (It seems like this is never going to happen, so unless you’re made of money, you just have to be a good little urchin serf and lobby your local arcades.)

Nekomancer of Nowhere (Standing Cat, 2025, PC)

I was impressed with the amount of people we spoke to at PAX East who were receptive to or already conscious of the need to adapt their game for motor-impaired players.

We stopped at the booth for Nekomancer of Nowhere, a puzzle platformer where you’re a cat and also a witch and you draw symbols with the mouse to catch spells, set up with keyboards and mice. This is already out now on Steam. I watched Margaret play it and it was good fun all round, so I decided to ask one of the people on the booth whether controller support was planned. It’s being worked on! That person directed me to the person who was actually working on implementing it, with the aim of getting Steam Deck verification. Their apparent plan is to have the spell symbols draw themselves after selecting them from a menu, which feels like it might take some of the fun out, and I wouldn’t mind drawing them with an analog stick, or gyro, or Dualsense/Dualshock 4 touchpad. Either way, they’re thinking about these things, and it’s absolutely a game that I’m going to support when I can play it without assembling a bespoke Steam Input profile.

Trade School Party demo (https://biancasstuff.itch.io, https://linktr.ee/endermyne, https://itch.io/profile/justamegumin, https://sites.google.com/view/cjv-art/home, 2016, PC)

We don't usually put assets in, but Margaret and I are increasingly on our micro-game bullshit, and were especially excited to be asked to play Trade School Party, the product of a 48 hour micro-game game jam hosted by students at Southern New Hampshire University, while walking by their stall.

It was so cool to play a game in its infancy and I was flattered and appreciative that two of the developers saw me playing it and asked me accessibility questions about my experience with it.

There’s an itch.io build (which I’m gathering is what we played), and it’ll be worth following; all of the best microgame collections have a singular theme or focus in their levels, so it’s got legs.

The latest comment on development from the team is that students have exams (what a concept), so it’s going to take a bit to spin back up. But, we're told that the plan is to re-build the game ‘from the ground up’ this Summer to 'future-proof' development, with the overall goal of a Steam release (although they did also say 'no promises', which is fair enough at this stage in development).

I like that the controls for each game are displayed on screen, it’s the best middle ground between WarioWare’s giving you nothing but a verb (leading to many of the games being byzantine for the first few goes) and Bishi Bashi stopping the action to give you a lengthy tutorial before each micro-game.

Some of the games could benefit from additional complexity. For example, there’s one where you film a newsreader and get points (points, that’s also a novel addition) for training the camera on him, but he stands still. He should move around a bit. But, it’s early on, and this is game development as it is; Seeing an idea sprout into a game jam and beyond is super exciting, and getting to see and play Trade School Party in the booth was great fun.

I love that the developers (we met Amy and Lyra in-person) are conscious of accessibility. Xbox controller support is a good start, but scope for additional controllers supported out of the box is always worth thinking about. The team has, so far, struck the right balance between the right number of buttons in play, in that all of the games can be played with an analog stick and the A button. Implementing additional face buttons could work (Bishi Bashi uses three, and that’s just enough complexity), but Margaret and I have found that that’s sometimes hard to co-ordinate in fast micro-games, so we kind of like that Trade School Party has gone back to the simple control scheme of WarioWare: Mega Microgames.

Part of me wants a single-player mode for when Margaret and I are not together, but the competitive points scoring is a good USP, and if the team continues developing Trade School Party, it could make for a brilliant party game, and might not need to be more than that.

I think you should stick it on, and manifest that they team keeps going with it.

Trade School Party made PAX for me. Playing it on the floor and being asked about the hemiplegic experience reminded me that most people are just trying to get on with their lives, and want to help others. That whole vibe just seems to be PAX. Because I attended, I’m back on feeling optimistic about video games versus preferring to chew my own lips off because it turns out that many people are, in fact, mindful of my lived experience playing them. I felt more like myself at PAX than I have anywhere in public, which feels meaningful. Thanks, PAX. Thax.

Collapsus (Wraith Games, ‘coming soon’ but also in early access now, Android, PC)

I know that there are more than enough falling block puzzle video games and that Tetris is and remains the very apex of the genre. HOWEVER, the other big big big big BIG takeaway of PAX East 2026 for me was Collapsus, a falling block puzzle video game.

The elevator pitch is Bejeweled meets Tetris meets Bookworm, but with gravity? It sounds wild and a little overstuffed (there are so many modes trailed in the early access itch.io build that you can play right now), but has got its claws into me.

You break blocks to make color sequences of four or more, but you can shift the direction of gravity. You have a set number of moves that you top up by making matches, and there are power-ups that do things like blow up blocks in a radius or recharge your moves. We happened upon it and watched for a couple of minutes trying to fathom it, drawn in by the bright colours. A person was playing the game very well and I said to Margaret ‘they look like they know what they’re doing’ and then they turned around and said ‘I’m the art director’, so OOP.

I’ve come away enamored with it, and play it on my phone or Thor when I get a spare moment on a bus or wherever. I love that there’s a PC and an Android build, so I can play it on near-enough anything, anywhere. I love that when you connect a controller there are buttons for controlling the gravity but if you play on a phone or just a touchscreen device then rotating the device (or pressing on-screen arrows) controls the gravity. It’s super intuitive. The main constructive criticism I had playing it at the booth was that there wasn’t an on screen indicator for the direction that the gravity is going in, but this is actually in the settings and I suppose just wasn’t enabled in the booth. There are color palette options planned to allow colorblind users to play.

The website says ‘no micro-transactions’ and ‘free DLC’ forever, and if they keep to that, fair play. There’s something unsettling and corrupting about the idea that a game like this can’t just come out as a complete product that then might get support but also is considered done so that the developers can work on something new, but their hearts are in the right place, so okay.

Collapsus is absolutely brilliant in its current state, and pay what you want in early access. The art director did tell me that a purchase of at least a dollar on itch.io will get you a Steam key for the full release (it’s also listed on Steam for wish-listing as ‘coming soon’), so you may as well. I paid $10 for it and I still feel like I’ve underpaid. If I was made of money I would back it financially. Margaret bought it too, and a friend has wish-listed it. You can also play the early access build for no money whatsoever because it’s pay-what-you-want, so get it down you, you bastard.

I will say that the early access Android version has bugs on some devices. Sometimes the rotation gets stuck using a controller. Plus, if I end a game with the screen rotated, the game over screen will also be rotated.

Both Margaret and I can attest that the best way to play the Android version is on a phone, where you can use on-screen arrows to control the rotation (good for if you get motion sick, or any reason, such as not wanting to look like a right tit on the bus). On a phone, the game screen also isn’t made smaller by having a border placed around it.

I’m tempted to spin up the PC version on Gamenative on the Thor, or the Legion Go and see how it does, but that might be a ‘when it launches’ thing, given how well the above configuration works.

Thanks for reading this month’s Capitalist Overlord Raccoons!

Sunday at PAX East was one of those days that I didn’t want to end. PAX tickets are expensive as it is, but if I was made of money I would have also gone on to the Toontown Corporate Clash panel. I maintain that Disney’s Toontown Online was the greatest MMORPG on this Earth and that Corporate Clash is the best revival of it. I’m gutted to have missed it. Maybe next year.

It’s been a whirl-windy month. Beyond PAX, I was over with Margaret for three weeks, and I’ve fallen into the thing of playing video games and then forgetting to write about them because I’m having so much fun playing them.

That’s good, because it means I’ve addressed the problem of me not making enough time for video games and my hobbies and myself, which is why this site even exists. Life should be less busy and the waking hours should not be existential. There should only be video games. I think that’s our mission statement.

That’s it. See you next month.

#AYN Thor #Bishi Bashi Special #Collapsus #Facebreaker #Fading Echo #Fishbowl #It Takes A Village #Lenovo Legion Go #Linux #Mayflash Dolphinbar #Nekromancer of Nowhere #Nintendo GameCube #Nintendo Wii #PAX East #Pianista #ROCKNIX #Skin Deep #Throwback Jai-Alai Heroes #Toontown: Corporate Clash #Trade School Party #Untitled Goose Game #Valve Steam Deck #Venba #WarioWare #WarioWare: Mega Party Games #Wii Fit Plus #Wii Sports