Last month, I
had my first existential crisis for this website. Maybe my second. It’s hard to
tell because I dump my emotional garbage into these journals, they have
collected too many flies for me to read through all of them again. Putting that
aside, last month, I questioned if it was worth it to keep plugging away on
this website.
My crisis
followed the stereotype closely:
Why work so hard if no one really reads my
writings?
At my current pace, will I accomplish anything?
Will my work be swallowed by the Internet beast
which has feasted on much better content already?
Who would be my audience anyway? The hipster Switch
fan club who yearns for something more than the mainstream review sites?
Add a liberal
dash of self-pity and you have a recipe for destruction. I have allowed the
dreams of my website to overtake its actual purpose: to allow me an outlet to
practice writing. In the last three months, I have written five articles,
something I used to do in one month. I have noticed the difference. I’m
grumpier; I’m a little more aimless. Most of all, I feel guilty.
When I write, I reach a flow, and even a review for Spacecats with Lasers can act like an anti-depressant. The pressure to get my name out there has made the afterglow of writing less pleasant. In the past, when lack of fame had weighed on me, some humor and good ol’ gumption overcame it. Now, it is a little harder to call upon such energies.
How will I get
out of this funk? I’m still working on it, but I imagine the answer is a
combination of my love for writing, a reminder that things change, and
finishing that god-damn blogitiorial I have been working on for three months.
Is it guarantee
that I will keep going? No. It never is. I, alone, choose whether I keep this
website alive or allow it to die. We make this choice for ourselves every day;
it is just a question of whether we allow it to be a crisis.
When I was 16, I finished writing my one and only novel. At over 300 pages of single-spaced, 12-point-sized text, it was a behemoth achievement for me, two years in the making. It also sucked. My mother—bless her—couldn’t get past the first fifty pages. I will forever treasure my deformed, malnourished book baby, but I will never self-publish it, let alone charge money for it. Even if I reach Stephen King levels of popularity, my first book will never see the light of public eye, much like the erotic retelling of Care Bears I penned for Netflix.
Spacecats with Lasers feels like a programmer’s first video game. He tried his darned hardest, but his skill could not match his ambitions. The final product ended up being amateurish. Sure, the game may mark the first step in a remarkable career for the programmer, but unfortunately, this first step landed in the litter box. Maybe we could accept it if it were free, but it’s not. I know this is not Bitten Toast’s first game, but unlike the commendable Rocket Fist, Spacecats with Lasers would have done better to remain in the developer’s unpublished portfolio than with the rest of the eShop’s shovelware.
What is it?
After
years of feline oppression, the pug king has rallied all of the mutated mice
scattered across the universe and has launched a war against the cat
species. You control Meowsky
Tongue-Catcher, the Puss Empire’s ace pilot, who must destroy wave after wave
of mice forces to ultimately assassinate the pug king and quash the last of the
resistance. All seems to be going
smoothly for Meowsky until he realizes he has single-handedly caused mass
genocide. In an act of retribution, he
allows the mice forces to decimate his ship with him inside. Spacecats doesn’t actually contain any of this plot, but it
makes for a great rough draft for my second novel.
As I
dramatized, Spacecats is a multidirectional shooter, tasking you with
killing ever-growing waves of mice, with the pug king making an appearance
every ten levels. You shoot with ZR,
reload with R, and dodge with ZL.
Between levels, you choose a permanent upgrade (increased fire rate,
more health, larger lasers), and enemies can drop temporary powerups. Lose too much health or hit an enemy directly
and you die. Lose all three lives, and
it’s game over.
You can
choose from one of three difficulty levels at the beginning, and different hats
and ships can be purchased with trinkets you earn from playing. If you’re feeling frisky, you can even look
at your high scores. If you’re feeling
super frisky, you can close out of the game altogether.
What’s bad?
Much like the life of a moon, Spacecats’ gameplay is slow, dull, and based predominantly on moving in big circles. Your enemies largely gravitate toward the middle of the level, so circle-strafing will help you dodge almost all bullets and bogeys. This may make waves easy, but it sure doesn’t make them go quickly. Your ship moves through space like it’s lard, and enemies soak up several hits before blowing up. Add a small ammo clip and a long reload time and Spacecats is only one half of the bullet hell it wants to be.
Upgrades barely impact gameplay. They typically improve your ship’s capabilities by five or ten percent, but these raises account for little more than cost-of-living as each wave brings more enemies. In another game, these upgrades would make for cool offensive or defensive builds, but for Spacecats, the upgrade screen only offers a change of scenery.
Spacecats’ bugs can kill you, as if even they know you shouldn’t be playing. One glitch causes you to be stuck reloading, and another prevents you from respawning after you die, forcing you to quit out.
A bug captured in its natural environment.
What’s also bad?
If the bugs don’t kill you, poor design choices will finish the job. The camera sits at a tilt rather than directly above you. This allows you to see more space above you but leaves little room below you, allowing enemies to creep up on you before your floaty controls can guide you to safety. Your dodge is unintuitive because you dodge toward where you’re aiming, not where you’re moving. This may seem innocuous until you realize you’re typically shooting at enemies when you need to dodge suddenly. Two enemy types further mess up gameplay. Shield mice provide impenetrable barriers to their neighbors until they’re destroyed, and these neighbors tend to cluster and create a forcefield around your target. Killing them will try your patience more than your skill. Yellow laser mice somehow prove more annoying. Sometimes their lasers barely follow you; other times they cling to you like sweaty skin on leather, destroying a third of your health.
If the presentation were a space ship, it would be a cardboard cut-out of a PT Cruiser with “UFO” painted on it. The character models seem like free downloadable assets designed for the Wii, and the backgrounds of each stage are no more than static images of faraway galaxies. The cliché electronica soundtrack attempts to create a heart-thumping beat but comes off as a toddler pounding at a keyboard. Hitting mute is recommended, followed by power.
Spacecats is a sickly kitten with no meat on its bones. New enemies stop at the tenth wave, and the hard difficulty only emphasizes the game’s faults. With no online leaderboards, there is absolutely no point to continue playing past an hour unless Spacecats is your final trial before achieving Zen.
What’s the verdict?
Spacecats
with Lasers earns the
dubious award of being the worst game on my Switch, a feat which I hope stays
with it. With games of this caliber, I
would love to read a review written by the developer. Would they criticize their game as viciously
as I do? Could they honestly recommend
their game to anyone? We all have rough
patches in our careers, but ideally, others don’t have to experience them.
Arbitrary Statistics:
Score: 2.5
Time Played: Over 3 hours
Number of Players: 1
Games Like It on Switch: Assault Android Cactus+, I Hate Running Backwards
“Choose a job you love, and you’ll never work a day in your life.” There are some days I would punch Confucius in his philosophical nose for spouting out such simple nonsense. I imagine he embedded this quote in some manuscript that explained it in greater detail, but popular society has decided to trumpet this singular sentence when people are thinking of career choices. God knows I heard the saying enough during my days in college.
If I could choose any job, I would love to be a writer, and I’m sure as a writer, I would never work a day in my life. Unfortunately, this is also called unemployment, and this doesn’t necessarily put food on the table or video games in the Switch. As such, I chose a career path in college that could earn me a consistent income, and I pursued it knowing that I would genuinely enjoy the work I would be doing. I have days when I am fully in my element, when the day flies by. I’m almost always proud of what I do.
I also have weeks when I am slaughtered by my workload. Sometimes, Friday night rolls around, and I’m already dreading Monday morning without even having started my weekend. Most of us will experience these hardships, and you know what? We get past them. It sucks; we don’t like it, but we move on.
This week’s video is spawned from exhaustion, routine, and Spacecats with Lasers. Because I am still early in my career as a YouTuber wannabe, I have no idea if anyone will notice a difference in my videos. The nervous chihuahua in my head is yipping incessantly, yapping that I stuttered more frequently and came off as less entertaining. I have no way of confirming this unless I ask people for feedback, but the chihuahua is afraid of talking to people as well.
Let it be known that I would have probably referred to a part of my brain as a chihuahua, regardless of my work week.
No matter my excuse, I still made a video, and that’s a triumph. If it’s good or bad, let me know. I’ll be over here peeing on a fire hydrant while watching you with my big ol’ bug eyes.
