Best of Next Fest 2023 1/20/24

And at long last, the end of this particular Next Fest, but there are more to come.

Sudo Sweep

It’s not a command to delete temp files as root on a Unix-styled system! It’s a fun and free little game over at itch.io!

The board on the left is a Sudoku-like game; the board on the right is Minesweeper. The two boards match: the numbers on the Sudoku board are the number of mines in the matching area of the Minesweeper game. You use each to help you solve the other!

It’s not perfect, mind you. There’s currently no way to mark a square that definitely has a mine in it, just the question marks you see in the right-hand board above. There are still cases, familiar to players of standard Minesweeper, where you end up having to guess. And don’t click the “change size” button if you care about the current game: it doesn’t make the boards larger, it starts a new game with bigger Minesweeper and Sudoku boards!

Still though, I have to give creator Rianna Suen props for a cool idea! I found this through the “map obelisk” area during Roguelike Celebration, which is a pretty cool place to find things beloved of clever people!

Sudo Sweep (itch.io, free, playable by web)

JRPG Junkie: Beginning With Super Robot Wars

I usually try to take my own screenshots, but this one is borrowed from JRPG Junkie’s article. I figure it should be okay, since I’m using it explicitly to promote said article!

JRPG Junkie looks at the Super Robot Wars series, the mostly-Japan-only giant fighting robots game series with over 70 entries and that crosses over everything (in various games) from Gundam to Full Metal Panic to Cowboy Bebop to Captain Harlock to Gunbuster to Giant Gorg to Evangelion to The Big O. The article, which is far far more knowledgeable about it than I am, is an excellent place to start with this extremely prolific series.

Some of the Switch versions of these games have English translations built-in, and because you can log onto any region’s store on the Switch, those particular versions can be enjoyed by English-speaking players the world over. But there are tons of these games, and many have fan translations, if you’re willing to jump through those particular mechanized, articulated hoops.

Where To Start With Super Robot Wars