This edition of my Unsorted series is a little different from what's come before – instead of writing out a bunch of paragraphs interspersed with screenshots, I've recorded a video of myself playing the game and making stupid comments. Ascension, as it turns out, is a fairly substantial game, so it's going to be the only one featured this time.

I think I'll do videos in future, but future ones will probably have more than one game – whatever it takes to get to the half an hour mark. The audio's a bit quiet this time, and obviously it's my first time doing something like this, so expect later videos to be better.

In conclusion, Ascension is going into my Other folder, just to avoid putting yet another of these games into Adventure¹². Bit of a copout, but maybe once I'm done with this unsorted project I can go through that and make new categories for some of these poor miscellaneous games.

Despite my stated gripes about the game's controls and savepoints, I'll be returning to Ascension. It's not perfect, but it's definitely well made enough that you can see the creator really cared about what he was doing. Also, gotta find out what's going on with that story. I have a weakness for games that interrupt normal play with weird dream sequence levels.

Still, though, don't turn my cursor into a hand if you're not going to let me grab anything with that hand, because that's just teasing. And don't have designated save points if you're not going to make me start over from them when I die, because that's just making it inconvenient for me when I exit the game intending to return later and play some more.

1 – Sometimes I feel like I could save a lot of time just by dumping the entirety of Unsorted into Adventure, with minimal casualties.

2 – And besides, this has far too many axe battles with zombies and far too few clickable items to fit in with the rest of the stuff in that folder.

On a separate note, I recently finished Thomas Was Alone. As a fan of platform games about parallelograms co-operating and platform games about parallelograms with meta narratives, it pushed all my buttons and then some.

What's amazing about Thomas is the depth of the story and the characters, and the excellent narration that conveys it. What's amazing about Thomas is the sheer delight of the gameplay, the joy of discovering new uses for the mechanics, and the “oh no they didn'tâ€? of some of the truly inspired levels. What's amazing about Thomas is the sheer effort and inventiveness that went into making a 2D game about single-coloured blocks breathtakingly beautiful.

You can pick it up in as part of Humble Indie Bundle #8 for the next few days or so, and I highly recommend you do.

Oh, and I finally caved and got a Twitter account. It was largely because I was mucking around with the API on Codecademy³. But hey, the damage is done, so I figured I may as well follow some people and maybe post a few links. For years I was against Twitter and derided it because of how little interest I have in the average person's lunches and bus rides, but there are those accounts that have been put to pretty great use. And then there's this. Twitter, you're alright in my book.

And anyway, I'll probably just post links to blog posts, thereby retaining my (pseudo-)intellectual "I have thoughts that take more than 140 characters to express" higher ground. #savingface

3 – Fun site. A lot of what they teach is the absolute, absolute basics, but it's not a bad way to get a little practice in a new language (learnt Ruby in about two days) and who doesn't love getting achievements?