What Video Game Did I Play Yesterday?

Headliner (PC)

October 13th, 2022

I got Headliner up and running in English last night, by cheating and picking up a copy on Steam. Since I already owned it, getting a working copy and supporting the dev team didn't seem bad, especially not for just a few dollars. I did a playthrough and got a spectacularly bad ending, leading to assassination and my own murder, but it was a pretty satisfying ending, too, as far as things go. In the game, you choose what news stories you want the network you work for to run and see how they play out in the world around you after work. For this playthrough, I generally ran stories I felt okay about running with, and everything went to hell. In my next playthrough, I'll do it less as a role playing game and chase achievements to see the different ways that everything can go to hell.

My biggest problems with Headliner were a total lack of subtlety, both in terms of story beats and the easy-dichotomy style framing of the fictionalized issues, and the less relevant concern that the art is a lot nicer in the sequel. It's really short, too, but since it's a multiple playthroughs type of game, that's not so awful.

Anyway, even though I'm marking this off as cleared for now, having seen the game play out and feeling satisfied with my run, I'll go back to achievement hunt and see what other horrors I can unleash sometime in the future. A playthrough barely takes more than half an hour, so it'll be an easy thing to play on sleepy nights.

October 12th, 2022

Last night, after a decent day at work, I remembered that I had a game, Headliner in one of my old itch.io bundles that I wanted to try. I'd played and enjoyed the sequel on Switch, so this was actually one of the games that drove me to pick up a cheapo Windows PC that could run indie and retro games. I got the game downloaded, started it up, and then could not get the language set to English from the traditional Chinese default, even though I found it in the options. Well, I'll give it another try today!

I ended up playing King of Fighters XV for a very few minutes and got destroyed playing the boss challenge. I picked a team that didn't play to my strengths and was out of practice to boot, so it was not a shock that I got destroyed. It was still fun, though.