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Mountain Dew Game Fuel: The triumphant return edition.

I never thought I’d ever come back to this again. The last article I ever wrote about video game food and drink was 2016, covering the previous iteration of this specific drink. I mostly left these behind because I felt like I was being a dime store Dinosaur Dracula with these kind of articles, and decided to write things of more substance.

But if Mountain Dew – sorry, MTN Dew – is gonna go for a throwback, then I will too. Only because it was once a time-honored tradition on my blog. In 2023, as a throwback to slightly better times, Mtn Dew brought back Game Fuel as a proper soda.

After 2017, which featured promotional flavors to advertise Forza Motorsport 7 and Middle-earth: Shadow of War, they temporarily retired the Game Fuel soda flavors. Around 2018, PepsiCo tried a stab at the burgeoning energy drink market. The new Game Fuel, now under their AMP brand, kept the yearly game promotional tradition, but I didn’t really dabble with those as I’m not really an energy drink person, if the two times I tried both Monster Energy and Red Bull are any indication. Though admittedly, I was tempted to grab them a few times. These did keep things going with yearly promotions with games like Tom Clancy’s The Division 2 and the yearly Call of Duty installment, of which I really couldn’t tell you what they were like.

Presumably realizing the whole AMP Game Fuel thing was kind of a bust, Game Fuel returned as a special seasonal Mtn Dew flavor, much like LiveWire and WhiteOut before it. I was honestly surprised they were bringing it back, but with how the drink industry is, there’s always gonna be an audience who wants companies to bring back the Old Thing They Liked.

Now, the journey I went through to get these flavors was… quite an ordeal. While technology has gotten better in making it easier to find things like special flavors, getting both Game Fuel flavors was quite a challenge for me. After a thrift store trip earlier in the month, I waltzed into a 7-Eleven, expecting to grab the two flavors and be done with it. Sadly, the place only had one of the two flavors: The fan favorite Citrus Cherry. Using that fancy “Find your Dew” thing on the Mtn Dew website lead me to places pretty far away from where I lived.

Cut to a few days later. I check a local mom’n’pop convenience store and sure enough, they had both flavors. I grabbed a few bottles, of which the clerk had to use barcodes from Code Red to scan them in as Game Fuel wasn’t “in their system,” but it didn’t matter. I had finally grabbed the Game Fuel bottles for 2023, as you can see.

Just like old times.
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Blood of the Werewolf: The hunt for a good werewolf game.

(content warning: blood and cartoonish gore.)

Y’know, I realized there haven’t been many good games where you play as a werewolf. Out of all the horror monsters out there, werewolves seem to be the ones who get the shaft the most. Often times they’re used as an enemy or a villain, but rarely are they ever the hero. I even asked a few folks about good werewolf games and the one suggestion I got was a quest line in The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. So yeah, it seems kinda dire.

But then there was this one game I saw where you play as a werewolf that seemed kinda neat. And I have a knack for playing the fairly niche Xbox Live Arcade/PlayStation Network titles from the early 2010s, so I grabbed it. Will this game be the one that breaks that curse?

Gotta say, that title is metal as hell.

Blood of the Werewolf is a platforming game developed by Scientifically Proven, a studio that proudly boasts its 11-person development team, as per one of the load screens states. Scientifically Proven doesn’t have much of a major resume; outside of this game, they worked on assisting Epicenter Studios on games like Real Heroes: Firefighter and… Man vs. Wild with Bear Grylls. Now, to be fair, just because they work on what amounts to shovelware doesn’t mean they can’t put out an original game on their own. But this definitely doesn’t bode well.

I had heard of this game because it was being one of the few games being delisted off of the Xbox 360 marketplace. I was trying to grab games that were only available on the 360, and since this had a PC release, I figured I’d just grab it there instead. In hindsight, this was probably a good move, as we’ll get into in a bit.

This was available a few days early for patrons. Wanna get in on that yourself? Well, transform into a werewolf and howl your way over to my Patreon, where just $1 will get early access to my work. It’s fun! Like being a werewolf.

She’s quite the resilient mother, that’s for sure.

The story goes like this: You play as Selena, a mother who’s child, Nickoli, has been kidnapped by some monsters, and her husband has been left for dead. Armed with her trusty crossbow, she must travel the various hazards of the world to save her son and keep the blood family alive. Oh, by the way, Selena is also a werewolf. One of a dying breed, according to this game’s lore.

This… doesn’t bode well.

Selena in her human form has the usual platformer rules: Walk, jump, climb ladders, and shoot a crossbow. Pressing RT will shoot in the direction she’s facing, but using the right stick will have her aim at a specific angle, which can be useful for hitting enemy targets or switches.

If you’re expecting an elaborate transformation sequence, you will be solely disappointed.

At certain points in each stage, Selena turns into a werewolf upon a full moon, which follows common werewolf lore. In werewolf mode, she can double jump, do a forward dash with RB, and charge up a damaging shot with RT that takes a bit of time to charge. There’s other powerups you can find and switch between with LB, but for most of the game I stuck with the default dash. Playing as a werewolf is a lot simpler than playing in human form, which turns out to be a good thing, as I’ll get into. The game will switch between Selena’s two forms at certain spots, and sometimes they get quite crafty with the change.

I knew something was off when the first level takes place in The Sewers…
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Avicii Invector: A rhythm game tribute to an electronic musician.

(content warning: mention of suicide.)

My tastes in music are… rather eclectic. If you’ve ever been a longtime reader of the site, you’ve probably had me write about some of the weirdest stuff and sometimes finding good stuff in them. I end up picking up soundtracks a lot because of the licensed music. Hell, while I may not talk about it a lot on the site here, I really enjoy rhythm games. So when I saw a rhythm game based on one of the most notable EDM artists out there, I had to give it a try, even if I never heard of him before playing it.

Is he about to drop the sickest beat?

Avicii Invector is a rhythm game developed by Hello There Productions, a small developer based out of Gothenburg, Sweden. Originally released in 2017 on the PS4 as simply Invector, the game was updated and re-released in 2019 to more prominently feature the artist whose music was used in it, Avicii. Avicii is the stage name of Tim Bergling, a Swedish EDM musician who was a major worldwide success, releasing two major albums and a few EPs in his lifetime.

Tragically, Avicii committed suicide in 2018 at the young age of 28. In the years that followed, there’s been work released posthumously, an Avicii museum in Stockholm, Sweden, and his family launching The Tim Bergling Foundation, a mental health/suicide awareness charity, in his honor.

I grabbed this game on a cheap discount on Fanatical, a digital discount storefront. Since I’m a fan of rhythm games – glancing at the hundreds of dollars I’ve spent on Rock Band and Guitar Hero stuff over the past decade – I figured I could probably enjoy this game even with only knowing Avicii as “a guy who has a game dedicated to his music.”

So I’m basically Faith from Mirrors Edge but piloting a spaceship? Cool.

The story is rather barebones: A female ship pilot has to send things to various planets, while blasting the songs of Avicii to get from planet to planet. These cutscenes play every few songs, and while they’re mostly non-contextual, they bring a bit of life to the game’s overall feel. After all, if you’re a rhythm game, you either play it super-serious like a Rock Band or you go full over-the-top like a good chunk of the Guitar Hero games did, so for Hello There Games to go for the latter route is a wise call.

I assure you it’s a bit more complex than this.

Avicii Invector plays rather simply: Press buttons in time with the music for points and to build a combo. While most of the time you’ll be pressing the face buttons, sometimes you’ll also need to hit either shoulder button for lines that are on the track. Changing lanes is handled with the left stick. Higher difficulties add more buttons to press and a lot more lane shifting, which can be quite disorienting if you’re not used to it. Much like most modern rhythm games, if one hits enough notes, they can activate a booster with the triggers which doubles score for a brief time.

While I’m used to games like Rock Band where it’s less about timing and more about making sure you hit the notes, Avicii Invector takes its cues from games like Dance Dance Revolution, where hitting notes right on time gets more points and a bigger combo. This took a bit for me to get used to, but thankfully the timing seems to be rather generous, even with that little gameplay quirk.

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Slingo Mystery: Who’s Gold? – A casual classic meets the modern casual game.

In the many years I’ve been writing about oddball video gaming stuff, I thought I covered it all. The unofficial expansion packs, the weird cross-promotions, the mostly forgotten cheap games that came out during the 2000s. But it wasn’t until recently did I realize there was one genre I never talked much about: The hidden object game.

A genre I haven’t really covered on here, the hidden object game involves usually finding a bunch of items inside a room to make progress. For a good long while, the hidden object genre was the go-to game for super casual gamers everywhere. I assume it’s still modestly popular, but I figure most people have since moved on to Candy Crush Saga and similar easy-to-understand mobile game offerings.

Normally, I wouldn’t cover these, but then I found an interesting hidden object game. One mashed up with a classic online game I remember from my teen years. When I spotted this game at a thrift store, I had wondered how they decided to bring back a mostly dormant franchise and combine it with one of the most popular casual gamer genres out there. Turns out it’s quite a journey.

James Bond this ain’t.

Slingo Mystery: Who’s Gold? is a game developed and published by Funkitron Games – no relation to Toejam & Earl – that combines the popular hidden object game with Slingo, a game show-like game that mixes slot machines with bingo. Released around 2007 for PC platforms, this game seemed to slip through the cracks, as I didn’t realize this existed until I picked it up last year at a thrift store.

A screenshot of Slingo Deluxe, one of the earlier offline versions of the game. Sadly, there isn’t much footage of the original online game available, so this will have to do.

But before we get into the game itself, a small primer on what Slingo is. You have a bingo card and every spin of the reels gives you five numbers to fill the card with. Alongside the numbers are jokers – a wild card that can be used to mark any number on the column its on, gold coins – gives you extra score, and the devil, which cuts your score in half. You have up to 20 spins to fill the card, and the first to do so wins the game.

Slingo is a game I fondly remember from my days of playing it on America Online. For people of my generation, Slingo was one of those classic games people played in the early 2000s, web 1.0-era internet. That, Yahoo Games, You Don’t Know Jack: The NetShow and Acrophobia are many of these online games I fondly remember. Sadly, most of these are gone now, or live on through fanmade clones.

Totally forgot how jovial the Zynga Slingo joker was.

I’ve talked about Slingo once before: Way back in 2012, covering the time Zynga licensed the game for a Facebook mobile game that was fairly short-lived. It was perfectly fine, but filled with microtransactions and nagging your Facebook friends for help, which was pretty common at the time. Thank god we kinda moved past that.

But I’ve waxed enough nostalgia. Let’s get into the hybrid Slingo meets hidden object game that is Slingo Mystery: Who’s Gold?

Freddy doesn’t really seem happy to be there…

You play as Maggie Gold, a divorced, destitute woman who finds out from her friend Kyle Sparks that her ex-husband Freddy has passed, and decided to give his massive Las Vegas casino, “The Gold Casino,” to his current wife Gloria. Throughout the various areas of the casino, Maggie tries to find out the secrets of the casino, which involves a bunch of unusual item hunting and puzzle-solving.

This is the usual fare for hidden object games: Mostly licensed properties like Gameloft’s The Blacklist: Conspiracy.

Now, normally I wouldn’t talk too much about hidden object games. They always seemed to be the kind of genre that would flood the bargain bins of office supplies and department stores, sitting alongside a rack of cheap PC releases of games past like Braid or Far Cry 2. To me, these kind of games peaked when books like I Spy and Where’s Waldo came out. I couldn’t imagine these kind of games were anywhere near my wheelhouse.

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Some Stuff I Bought: First half of 2023 Edition.

Damn, half the year has already gone, hasn’t it? Since we’re now in the back half of 2023, it’s time to give my twice-yearly update of some stuff I bought for the first half of the year.

Admittedly, my purchasing habits slowed considerably. The beginning of the year was a rough time for me, which lead to a lot of impulse purchases. Not anything here worth blogging about, but those purchases certainly made a dent in my funds. I’ve gone out more frequently than before, but most of the time I went and checked out a few places and hung out with some folks on the weekends instead of actively seeking out stuff.

However, that doesn’t mean I didn’t buy stuff that could potentially be article material. For instance, Who Wants to be a Millionaire: The Album, an article I wrote about back in April, was a random eBay purchase. But the hunt only works when it’s more spur-of-the-moment, not done on a computer. And of course, I did buy a few things that I think are interesting to me, at least.

$10 at FanExpo Portland:

Is it “Mission” or “Missiøn”?
“SPLURP!!”

– Baseball Kids (Game Boy, Japan)

– Power Mission (Game Boy, Japanese version)

Back around February, I went to FanExpo Portland. A catch-all nerd convention, but of the old-school Comic Con kind, where there’s a lot of local artists and lesser-known comic book artists alongside the headliners, which were most of the cast of Back to the Future – Michael J. Fox, Christopher Lloyd, Claudia Wells and Thomas F. Wilson – but they were asking a bit too much to see them, plus the lines were too long, so instead I settled with selfies with acclaimed voice actor Nolan North instead.

I wasn’t really intending to shop much, but I did find a booth that had some Japanese Game Boy games, of which were $5 each. Downside is that I overpaid, as both games go for less than a few bucks each loose. Oh well.

Power Mission did come to the States under the same name, but I figure owning the Japanese release would be amusing. A strategy game where one controls ships and planes on a grid, it probably plays similarly to the Advance Wars series of games. I honestly thought it was gonna be a Battleship knockoff, but it is far from it. And might be a bit more challenging than I can possibly play. Well, at least it has the writing of somebody’s name in Japanese, which is a nice souvenir.

The other, Baseball Kids, is a Jaleco baseball game with a cartoony cover: A baseball player sliding into home plate, with the onomatopoeic word “SPLURP!!” drawn on it. I’m gonna be honest, I only bought it because of the cover. Baseball games of this era were fairly simple and while the game featured looked at least somewhat fun, it probably isn’t gonna be my favorite sports game.

But I will always remember “SPLURP!!”. It’s so silly.

SPLURP!!

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