Out of curiousity I searched "Metroidbrainia" on Bluesky and the most recent result was less than a day ago. So I guess that one's sticking around for at least a decade.
*A week passes* Hey… it's called "Titanium Court" after Titania from Shakespeare, isn't it?
(Leon remarked, as if it won't be a Blue Prince type title where it means three things)
Post a game that no one else remembers
*sees package at the supermarket produce aisle labeled "MICROWAVE IN BAG"*
*looks inside*
*only contains food*
I used to think it was a bit strange for the caves in Donkey Kong Country to be palette-swapped into such divergent colours as brown, puce, purple and green, but now I'm realising that it's representative of tourist attraction lighting (source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:YinZiYan_-_%E9%93%B6%E5%AD%90%E5%B2%A9_-_Silver_Cave_44.jpg)
Walking up behind Michaelangelo in the midst of working on David and explaining that he could save a lot of effort by only sculpting the front side and placing it against a wall, in modern English
Titanium Court is definitely getting gassed-up to the stars and back, but the mass coyness toward describing its terrain-placement puzzle mechanics is giving me some pretty high expectations.
It's gonna be funny if I play it and it turns out to somehow just be Otostaz (2002).
Somewhat dismayed to report that Twitter aka X has now changed the "Following" tab into "Following 🞃", which requires an additional click to actually get chronological sort. I sure wonder how long this is going to stick.
Donkey Kong Bananza should have had exactly one banana that was taped to a wall.
I think the one big "verbal tic" I've picked up from Deltarune 3+4 isn't even any line of dialogue, but just doing big meaty finger-snaps like the one Tenna does to transition into his boss fight screen.
…
Like, I've handled a Swiss army knife and the scissors are not great. Having to use the corkscrew or the screwdriver with only the rest of the knife as grip would get old very fast. I think only the knife blade lives up to the hype, and even then it's on a hinge.
People often use "Swiss army knife" to mean "utility that does every major and minor task in this problem area in the best way possible" but to me that feels quite off from the real-world object, which is meant to use very little space to do a lot of things very suboptimally.
Open source utilities and formats having goofy names like JSON or WASM or Brotli or FLAC or CHD or Zstd may get old sometimes, but by gum it sure beats video encoders and color space format names all being handfuls of numbers like BT709 or H265.
Just read an article lamenting that plenty of laypeople now believe video resolution, as presented by YouTube and Twitch players, is a measure of video compression loss instead of video dimensions… which is a fact so dreadful that it had simply not occurred to me >_>
In closing, if anyone has any idea what's actually going on, I'd appreciate it.
Not only am I unable to identify the existence of Renee Blot, but the 2011 article cited for Wikipedia's paragraph (https://archive.is/0Xs5U) openly contradicts that claim.
(FWIW I actually find the reply more credible than a long-after-the-fact claim by Hefner himself…)
Tried to look up who came up with - specifically - the idea for giving the Playboy bunny costume sleeve-cuffs attached to nothing. Wikipedia says it was added in 1962 by Renee Blot, but the only other source I could find for this is a 2017 blogspot reply. http://web.archive.org/web/20180305164225/https://blog.fidmmuseum.org/museum/2017/09/a-colony-of-colors-the-iconic-playboy-bunny.html
I think UTF-8 is the only time when software engineering actually successfully solved a huge problem definitively forever - and yet, even then, I still know of a few situations where you really do need UTF-32 instead of it (for constant-time arbitrary indexing).
The fact that humanity had to head back to the drawing board on something as bland as UUIDs, as recently as one-and-a-half years ago, really says a lot in that context.
It's been the Year of the Horse for a full day and no one's posted "Everything happens so much" yet…
*starts typing complete list of complaints* First of all, there's way more than 1,151 of those on the internet; seco
Why is this one of the Archive Dot Org frontpage's "top collections"
Now that Betty Boop is public domain, I'm awaiting the Mr. Boop TV adaptation with pre-twiddled thumbs.
I'll admit I'm curious about the acclaim for Urban Myth Dissolution Center, but I've started to get word that the official English TL is bad…
Saw a thread asking people what their favourite game was when they were alive in 2005. Straining the ol' rememberbellum makes me realise, even though I was playing Thousand Year Door, Smash Bros. Melee, and a LOT of NetHack, the truest answer… is probably Sexy Parodius in MAME…
I haven't really thought about Umineko or spun it around in my head in about a year and a half, but I will give Uni Akiyama credit: one listen of Black Liliana from the OST is enough to drop me right back in there.
I feel like what people think of "Umineko", what they mostly think of is Umineko episode 2 – and Black Liliana is the "episode 2 theme" to me.
They just did an RPG Maker default assets classical music game from Freem on RTA in Japan - you love to see it.
I'm this close to finally making a damn userscript that just automatically clicks over to the "Following" tab when the timeline loads. And then reusing it for clicking over to "Latest" in Bluesky search results.
I am somewhat dismayed to report that on X fka Twitter, the "For you" tab has gone into overdrive. *doesn't clarify what this means*
Idly speculating about how many "level-ups" I've dutifully earned across a copious lifetime of game-playing. If we exclude all Pokémon it's still gotta be in the low ten thousands.
This logo font has a lot to say about the world we live in
Was casually reading the announcement for Python 3.15 when I stumble on this line. I don't use the language too frequently, but it's nice to know all those times I was compulsively splashing encoding="utf8" everywhere were actually freaking required until now.
I feel like HTML is such a goofy language that even this many years on, it's still hard to take it seriously. It's never going to have the straight-spined dignity of C or Java or Rust, or even the respectability of another layout language like LaTeX.
One thing I think about in Angeline Era is that forcing you to only use food items *before* entering a dungeon, to gain the healing in advance as overheal, feels like how food should've been implemented in videogames all this time, instead of just being equivalent to medicine.
No, the true originator of indie games is the team behind Chair Chase (2002). What? You haven't heard of it? Why, that's because its primacy and momentousness is so obvious as to be beneath even the scarcest passing mention.
Just saw someone calling out using object emojis as bullet points in a product description or announcement as "GitHub aesthetic"
Huge Servo milestone: thanks to a swift response to a bug I reported, the Servo browser (https://servo.org) can now play Deltarune Dot Com's 404 page correctly.
Recently I got dissatisfied with how flat Firefox looks under high-contrast mode, so I went into userChrome.css and added a border-top colour to hovered and selected tabs. It's remarkable how effectively that one addition combined with border-radius can un-flatten the design.
I'm blowing open ludology with a new theory. I propose whenever a game has a character with a distinctive theme tune that plays whenever they appear, that's meant to represent the character having a remarkable scent (games sadly being limited to a scant 2.1 of the senses).
Wikipedia article editors have gotten really good at comedic delivery
"In Link's Awakening's true ending, Marin is granted her wish to leave the island by becoming a seagull. Unfortunately, her dream of singing for people is ironically thwarted when she arrives at the island of Rokkenjima, because when the seagulls cried, no one was left aliv
Today in Wikipedia images
"How old is this website"
Just discovered Chiptune dot com is inexplicably still online
Do you ever just look at a CSS tech demo that implements some neat gradient-based transition effect using pure CSS, and think to yourself "a plain image in a data URI has to be smaller than this"
Fine. I'll bite. What is 'it' in the phrase "don't get it twisted"? Up to now I'd been assuming it was the recipient's knickers, but
Game is called "Spooky Express"
Looks inside
Stopping at all stations
As a personal opinion… I feel like the big appeal of train networks is that they connect distant places into a single vast "system", so I feel this premise would have been solidly ideal for a contiguous world you could admire from afar such as in Monster's Expedition. Oh well.
#IPlayed Spooky Express (the train sokoban from Draknek). Not too bad, but I will say the final world being a haunted carnival but having no new mechanics beyond "the train platforms are longer" was a bit weak. I at least expected merry-go-rounds you can shunt passengers onto.
Oerlikon in Super Mario RPG's localisation is named after this thing??
Who is this reference even FOR
Yeah, sorry, I can't make it today, real embarrassing but Madotsuki turned into a stoplight and changed to red. Now she's just walking on different tiles to play sound effects. Yeah, no, yeah, it's her base walk speed so it's gonna be awhile yet. Tomorrow's probably good. Sorry.
Just been informed that the Pythonic equivalent of e.flatMap(w => w['tags']) is a nested list comprehension of the form "[tag for w in e for tag in w['tags']]", once again keeping me humble about my programming language assumptions.
Because alt+drag is actually a useful combination in Firefox, I bound it to Windows key+drag (having already unbound the Windows key's bind to the Start menu years ago because I find pressing it by accident way too annoying for what *should* just be a modifier key…)
I was reading a reddit thread about window title bars versus "header bars" (header bars are essentially toolbars or tab bars, such as in Chrome) and the main argument was that, as title bars are the only way to drag a window, header bars eat into that precious space too much.
I agreed… but then I thought, surely there's a better way to drag a window in 2025 than that one barren strip.
Anyway, I installed something that lets you modifier-key-click any part of the window to drag, which has apparently been a standard Linux feature for over a decade.
If you have Fate/stay night installed, then pressing the F8 key should launch it. It's not like anything's using that key for something more important.
THAT'S ALL!! I decided to shell out a lot more than I normally would to grab a good sample of this bothersomely large comic offering, so I hope y'all can use these recommendations as a good guide for the remaining… two hours of the sale… and counting.
Fallen into the Garden (https://is.gd/sfDmLo) – I liked this artist's previous comic, and while this continues last year's themes of space-faring culture-shock among sagely women, this one is more romantic and visceral. (Maybe the conclusion is a little abrupt, though.)
Bagatto (https://is.gd/toPJhy) – This comic is a platter of iridescent, sumptuous art and surreal dream scenes… maybe it doesn't have much to say writing-wise, but it successfully plays to its own strengths.
Aimé (https://is.gd/MAFHBU) – What initially seemed like a somewhat standard fairytale-type story with a simplistic art style managed to shock me with a few surprisingly touching scenes (including the climax) as well as several moments of artistic beauty.
Extraterrestrial (https://is.gd/yvkU1T) – A cute story with incredible colouring. Even if the characters and expressions might be a little too hammy, the dialogue is funny enough to keep up the story's momentum.
Sharpie's Mission of Rage and Justice (https://is.gd/7VXq9y) – A fun little wacky comic with great character interactions and dialogue that feels like it fits a lot into a little.
Li'l Burgers (https://is.gd/KpFGfM) – Funny and impressively well-drawn social satire about the contradictions of patriotism and globalisation, where national symbols violently and fruitlessly attack their own cultural irrelevance.
In Case of Turbulence (https://is.gd/PcPtrf) – While this is just a series of disposable memoir-type gag comics without any real conclusion, it gets my nod just for how snappy the punch-lines are.
Ladies of the Living Princess (https://is.gd/z7AfuL) – Despite a slow start (and somewhat muted ending), this grows to be quite the entertaining supernatural story with a surprisingly fun main couple.
Dead Horses (https://is.gd/cem4L8) – This one EASILY ranks as the best among the ones I tried this year. Excellent imagery and pacing, with a simple but not entirely predictable story, and characters who keep unfolding even far later than you'd expect.
Foreign Bodies (https://is.gd/Ii3SUN) – Much as this one has very good setup and a likeable main character, to me it spells out the pivotal reveal way too bluntly and reductively. It's a very "Shortbox-like horror story", truth be told, but that's not necessarily a knock.
As The Rot Blooms (https://is.gd/4hk393) – This one feels like it ends when it's about to get good, but even before that, it's not too bad as a slow-burn horror story, with very solid expressions and panel composition.
Big Fortress (https://www.shortboxcomicsfair.com/shop-sq4wj/p/big-fortress-by-chlo-ro) – The bulbous designs of this comic's characters give them a soft clay-like feel, which helps a lot at making this spot-black-drenched dark fantasy dungeon feel like a rundown home.
Girl Yaoi (https://www.shortboxcomicsfair.com/shop-sq4wj/p/girl-yaoi-by-ana-two) – Exactly what a comic called "Girl Yaoi" would be. A messy romance explored through BL references so specific that even *I* recognised one of them. This comic DOES contain actual pornography, so, praise the sun / caveat emptor (select one).
Leftovers (https://www.shortboxcomicsfair.com/shop-sq4wj/p/leftovers-by-luckycavity) – OK, this is a mess. Flow of events is often incomprehensible, and the panels frequently clash with each other for attention. Still, the strange premise and relationship amuses me a lot, and the panels in isolation are good.
A Little Beauty (https://www.shortboxcomicsfair.com/shop-sq4wj/p/a-little-beauty-by-laura-knetzger) and White Whale (https://www.shortboxcomicsfair.com/shop-sq4wj/p/white-whale-by-christine-fitzgerald) – I feel like both of these pair up well: bite-size quasi-paranormal horror stories about obsession, with great use of spot colour and memorable concluding imagery.
The previous year's thread… is right here!! https://x.com/webbedspace/status/1852027374751068229
YEEHAW! I'm back to review the limited-edition 2025 ShortBox comics (http://shortboxcomicsfair.com). Once again I brave wallet-shredding exchange rates to AUD to reap an eclectic mix of panelled art.
Wikipedia image descriptions at their finest
I'm trying to condition myself into becoming someone who'd actually switch to Linux. Just sitting alone saying things like "Oh, of COURSE I have opinions about what the best network time protocol client is" to myself.
17776 (2017)
Despite obvious similarities to Kid Radd and Crow Cillers (genre mix, fiction-like otherworlds, heavy HTML use) as well as a certain other "MS Paint" comic, it actually most closely resembles the 2018 Adult Swim short "Final Deployment 4" which no one except me remembers.
https://foreach.neocities.org/ – I just got dropped a rec for this webcomic, so I'm giving it a shot.
00s and 10s webcomic-heads like myself may find its basic premise and tone comfortingly familiar, albeit for a lot of different reasons at once.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Zhu_Zaiyu_dance.gif – Excellence in Wikipedia GIFs
It's funny to think about the theory that Hindu-Arabic base-10 numbers arose, not just from science or engineering needs, but because Hindu theology, in particular, involves extremely large numbers like the number of years in 1 kalpa (4320000000) or the Satya Yuga (up to 1728000)
Deltarune fanfic: the problem of how a small town can have its only exit road blocked with police tape for multiple days is solved by the construction of a ramp on the outside, allowing incoming cars to jump the tape.
Watching Mario Maker troll levels
Just spent 30 minutes struggling to remember what this awfully dinky melody that floated in from my deep subconscious was from, and finally managed to realise… that it's the theme… from the original Tux Racer…
https://animatedscreenshots.tumblr.com/post/173838521035/donkey-kong-country-donkey-kong-country-2 – Reviewing this set of GIFs… Diddy and Dixie kicking each other like footballs as their swap animation feels like it conveys something very specific about their relationship, unlike how they act to other kongs. They are circus clowns to each other.
This is a remake of a 2000s board game, and while the original designs do have some charm, I definitely prefer the children's-book art style over the original's standard high fantasy RPG theme.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1x4RiSeoZpu4PvdutJXvGiweArBptl6_r/view?usp=sharing - Uma… Musume? Yeah, sure, I'm playing that right now…
Recently I surveyed my most common Windows programs to sort out what exactly the F keys did in each, and I'm a little dismayed to report…… F9 doesn't have a real use?? Unlike its popular counterparts F1-Help and F5-Refresh, F9 is always some misc menu item, if anything at all.
I also find it a little amusing that the once-humble F11 has single-handedly claimed "fullscreen" almost entirely off the strength of Chrome and Electron shells.
The first ever "boss runback" in videogames was when Super Mario Bros. 1 didn't include midway checkpoints in the castles.
Still… the 10th anniversary of Undertale was yesterday, and I sent a few thoughts to a few people about what that game means to me 10 years on. Then I remembered I have a blog I could paste those sentences into.
So here, then, is my short UT reflection:
https://fairysvoice.net/blog/Undertale_10th_anniversary_reflection/
Wow, have I been incapable of accomplishing anything for the past month.
A huge and emotionally exhausting long-term event has started to finally unfold in my day-to-day life, but even before that, I've been demotivated into plain mental immobility.
Deltarune Chapter 1 (2018)
Anyway, what else… I've been playing the full version of Öoo. What I'll say is that it has the smuggest dead ends I've seen in any game ever. The sort of dead ends that level designers wax lyrical about years later. Genre-defining dead ends.
It's also a game that feels like it's trying to use the standard Metroidvania map screen to its maximum mechanical potential. Like it has a need to fully justify the exorbitance of a map screen after the game's predecessor (ElecHead) went perfectly well without it.
As one with not too small a connection to indie game and int-fiction creation, that defeat really got me in the gut.
Still, seeing people still fighting back even right now is giving me some heart. If you're one who's still raising your own ruckus about it, I'm very thankful.
I've been feeling rather depressed for the past week or so, so much that I haven't been able to string a single tweet together.
There are a few reasons, but the payment processor vs itchio debacle, and the shadow it casts over the future of the net itself, is high among them.
No one tell him
Nintendo just released a balance patch for Super Mario World (1991). Here's what's in it:
• Mask Koopa disguises improved
• Keyhole exits now make the THX noise when they expand
• Ludwig von Koopa's castle does 20% more damage to the hillside when it rockets into it
Papyrus: "WHAT DO YOU MEAN THOSE OTHER PRESSES ARE REQUIRED?!"
Papyrus: "AH YES. THE KONAMI CODE. THE SECRET OF ULTIMATE GAMING POWER! I REMEMBER IT LIKE MY PHONE NUMBER!
'UP'.
EVERY TRUE GAMER KNOWS!"
I think it's cute how Nintendo is fond of having you shoot through the air at high speed between different platforms, and inventing new ways to do it. In Galaxy it's the launch stars, in 3D World it's glass pipes, in Odyssey it's power cables, in Bananza it's monorail minecarts.
My only other opinion is that setting it fully underground and then making basically all the areas be floating islands beneath bright artificial skies feels, hmm, like a striking lack of faith in the whole concept.
I watched a longplay of Bananza to see what it's actually like, and by far the most entertaining part was the longplayer having the girl wear this freaking get-up for all the serious endgame cutscenes.
I find it a little funny that frictionless "ice-block-pushing puzzles" are now sufficiently normalised as a standard videogame puzzle that they appear in two Deltarune chapters and one ENA Dream BBQ chapter and none of them actually use ice
I didn't watch too much, but the GDQ runs that I liked this time in terms of clean execution were the RayForce run and the Mario Odyssey run.
The Blue Prince run was also OK as entertainment but I don't play or especially like the game itself.
This one seems simple enough that I suspect it's already been done, but I'm not familiar enough with parser IF esoterica.
Game idea: text adventure with "magic word" puzzles like XYZZY that you solve by typing the words – but the words collide with basic commands (e.g. "Magic word WEST") and you have to disable the command to use the word (e.g you can't say WEST unless you lock the door to the west)
Thinking about how the fundamental motivation for nearly all Deltarune darkners is "to be useful to lightners" – which even extends, tragically, to Ralsei – and that Rouxls Kaard's motivation is a perversion of that ideal, twisted into "to be useful to the strongest darkners".
Taken aback upon discovering just today that the creepy PlayStation 2 launch ads I remember from my teenhood were apparently directed by David Lynch.
I mean, it explains everything about them, but…
I took this Deltarune screenshot because I thought it might part of yet another brain-noogieing puzzle, but as soon as I did, I realised that if I was making this, I would have added a crease in the ground that makes the whole picture look like buttcheeks.
Watching a Netrunner metagame review
Imagining how much disk space YouTube could save if it just pre-sped all the deep dive documentary videos to 2x speed and made that the only viewing option in the first place
The ashtray from Control is in the corner, Sin Man's Betterifying machine from Betterified VI is being used as a mood lamp,
Tricking out my room with a Dark Fountain from Deltarune, a Smoke Machine from ENA Dream BBQ, the Mani-Mani Statue from EarthBound and the planetarium projector from Revolutionary Girl Utena to see if I can stack four surrealist fantasy worlds at once
OK, listen, I'm going to stick my neck out here and let loose with my own Deltarune theory. Rolling up my sleeves and putting my dignity on the line. Everyone get ready. Here it comes.
Chapter 3 is named "Late Night" because the knight is late
Just spent six hours doing nothing but reading Deltarune theorycrafting forum posts. This thread still has 39 more pages left.
Watching Netrunner
Thinking about how this one line in Deltarune is to me the quintessential Toby Fox flavour text joke
Deltarune chapter 3+4 playthrough screenshot favourites
Like, putting aside scenes and environments in the 2025 chapters… an interior like this is already heavily "letterboxed", and making it 16:9, so that you end up seeing all of both rooms instead of one, would be painful. The rooms would have to become caverns to make up for it.
Playing Deltarune and looking at it makes me think "Thank god this is still in 4:3"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bniNdxkx77k – Listened to this because a wiki page for ENA Dream BBQ said that one particularly memorable track from the game was a heavy stylistic takeoff of it… I like that track, and honestly this whole album feels like ten longer versions of it, so I'm happy ^_^
It's really amusing that the Mario Kart World soundtrack is the Kirby And The Rainbow Curse soundtrack of the Mario series, complete with most of the deep-cut retro remixes being surf rock.
Well, that's chapter 1 and 2 revisited. Now to head to bed to make sure I'm nice and well rested in 10 minutes from now
Most memorable is the scene where the tyrannical King finishes a handsome self-portrait, and then that ideal version of himself steps out of the painting, throws him to his demise, and then just is the King from then on. The mortal man replaced by his own propaganda.
Having watched the 'inferior' dub, I will say the film itself does live up to the praise… despite being ostensibly a Hans Christian Anderson adaptation, the worldbuilding is quite good, with visual motifs and themes that connect it to expressionistic art and film of the 30s.
(Reader, it is in a non-digitised archive and not "lost media")
Read an article about how the "unfinished" 1952 version of the animation La Bergère et le Ramoneur was a huge influence on Hayao Miyazaki, and also that the English dub doesn't have all the scenes, so I searched for the French original, and the first result was /r/lostmedia
I know a lot of people look down on chapter 1 as being slow and hokey compared to all the later chapters, but playing it back, a lot of things still make me smile and remind me how excited I was when I played it in 2018.
(Most of those things are in the Light World, though…)
REALISING I'M GOING TO HAVE TO TRASH THE SAVEFILE I HAD LINED UP FOR THE NEW CHAPTER AND START OVER BECAUSE I DIDN'T NAME ONION THIS
This game has a Sadie Hawkins Day joke? …I mean, I probably already knew that, at some point, but still, this is such a lowkey huge geographic-generational thumbtack to pin this game's world with.
I'm going to replay Deltarune in preparation for the big day, and every time a line of dialogue that I don't remember appears, I'm going to post it in this thread
In Donkey Kong Bananza™, you'll be shocked by a surprise team-up between DK and the most unlikely of characters… none other than Muddy Mole from Mole Mania for the Game Boy! The two brown beasts combine their digging skills to mine the Golden Bananas and the Crystal Cabbages!
The degree to which this really is just "ElecHead 2" musically and mechanically is kind of cute, although the central mechanic is pretty distinct and (insofar as the demo) emphasies a lot more slow planning and tense execution.
https://namatakahashi.itch.io/oo – Playing the öoo demo. It took 35 years, but humanity has one-upped the Yoshi bongos in Super Mario World.
Just started up a clean new file of Betterified VI: Bestified and within about 3 minutes I'd already found a new area I'd never seen before in my entire previous playthrough
Also thinking about how you essentially need a downloader like yt-dlp, and an MP4 video player that can zoom to "100%" to even watch it in this resolution at all.
Was watching "Can't Beat Airman (Team Neko-kan version)" from 2007 (https://www.nicovideo.jp/watch/sm542936), and thinking about how good the pixel art looks when it isn't being stretched from 360p into a goopy artifact mess by uncaring video hosts.
I was worried reading through Blue Prince forum threads would make me want to play the game, but all of them are like "Finally got the Atrium", "Can't figure out the Scullery", "Spoilers for the Boudoir", "the Inglenook is blowing my mind", "Anyone else got the Vomitorium"
More of the best of Wikipedia image captions
About as funny as when hard mode of Kirby's Dream Land causes the gentle falling foreground stars in level 4 to inexplicably do damage as well.
"What if the purely visual glowy sparks in this joke boss fight in the first level actually did damage though" in Dynamite Headdy is such a funny US localisation difficulty increase decision.
I JUST HAD TO DIG UP ONE SPECIFIC FILE FROM A HARD DRIVE FROM 2019 NOOOOOOOOOOO
People playing on emulator years after the release won't understand what it was really like at the time, but those of us who played it as children know the truth: Super Mario Land 1 really is Mario's blurriest adventure ever.
Highlights spotted on the upcoming Summer Games Done Quick roster
Well, it happened. I actually needed to go back to a full HD monthly backup from 2022 in order to retrieve one specific file, thus justifying keeping it around for the rest of my life.
Watching some Smash Bros.
I've been playing the new Netrunner set for eleventy-twelve hours since it came out yesterday, and now I'm all worn out
The Internet Archive reader for this paginates the scanned pages incorrectly, so the descriptions are for the NEXT illustration, not the displayed one, and now I'm thinking that having descriptions turn out to actually be off by 1 on purpose would be a HUGE puzzle book twist.
Me when I scroll your profile page
God, the post-lawsuit (not this suit, the previous suit) situation with Internet Archive is so painful. I found three copies of Maze: Solve The World's Most Challenging Puzzle on there. Two of them were prohibited from lending, but ONE arbitrarily wasn't.
OK, I'll admit it, I was this close to almost being sorta interested in Blue Prince. Then I realised I could instead get baffled by the predecessor, the muse, the original.
Honestly the ENA Dream BBQ world is just the Homestar Runner world but where Teen Girl Squad and the 20X6 characters and the like are just part of the same world instead of being in-universe fiction.
Just today seen two different posts from people who read spoilers about what the postgame of Blue Prince is like, and who promptly lost all desire to ever play it ever again, while simultaneously strongly recommending it.
Biggest surprise recontextualisation of out-of-context SNES assets I encountered while playing Betterified VI wasn't any of the actual jokes, but simply the realisation that the glass tube shatter noise from Super Metroid is actually juicy as hell.
I mean, I *could* pay $40 for Blue Prince, oooooooor I could pay $15 for the ebook version of the webcomic A House Divided and get the "plucky heir explores infinite shifting chaos mansion" concept but significantly wackier
Website called howlongtoboat which lists the time in a game until the first appearance of a boat. It immediately erupts into chaos over whether rafts count
Puyos are the Madou world's slimes… so that means garbage puyos… are metal slimes.
So when you finish a round with hundreds of garbage puyos left onscreen…… you're wasting millions upon millions of potential EXP (°Д°; )
Gray from Void Stranger painstakingly assembling a brand by rearranging tiles for five minutes, and then jumping into the hole and discovering it's a one-foot-deep painted black floor.
Tetris The Grand Master 4's backgrounds look so much like super-saturated Touhou UI backgrounds. It's unreal. I can see a TGM4 background and immediately think of a Touhou game that it resembles.
"Daddy longlegs" has to be the most old English name for an animal that is mysteriously still widely in use. The Robin Redbreast of spiders.
Rather old text file on my HD… This was an idea for an Undertale fangame that was a falling-block Puyo-like. The main gimmick was that the single-player CPU roster consists of characters no one particularly likes (with 3 exceptions).
https://www.twitch.tv/videos/2422440157 – April Fools being celebrated with the world's first and potentially last tournament for Mario & Yoshi
Soon… this tweet will become real… https://x.com/OpraZebb/status/1442611018220417027
Funny bit of Netrunner "symmetry" that I've liked ever since learning about it is how runners have a neutral economy card called "VoicePAD", a phone for taking jobs, but the equivalent card on the corps' side is "PAD Campaign", an advertisement for that same phone.
I tried the original Rhythm Tengoku "rhythm sense tester" for the first time in 5+ years, and the resulting line looked like a Richter 7 seismograph… u_u''''''''''''''''''''
Scientifically accurate truecolour space-telescope footage of me logging out every night
God I hope this one in particular sticks the landing
Well, this ruled. That's really all there is to say on the matter.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2741670/MINDWAVE_Demo/ - Now playing MINDWAVE (demo)
Playing Betterified VI and ENA essentially back-to-back has ruined my taste in games. Just now I started another game, and IMMEDIATELY something expected and logical happened : (
After crawling all over this game like a sack of termites… I'm actually getting worried about whether they can maintain this quantity of sheer work for another 3-to-5 chapters >_>'
…Which is kind of nutty to think for a 2-hour game, but, they WILL only get bigger from here…
🌚"AAA could never make ENA because they lack the courage to present the player with this much surrealism."
🌝"AAA could never make ENA because they lack the courage to have most of its secret areas contain nothing but a view to another area you literally cannot enter."
The 3D styles and environments are also pretty consistent, with most of the variation being in textures (low-res low-color-depth PS1-style, cel-shading, and modern styles).
All in all, the game's art direction has a lot more focus than may seem from its initial eccentricity.
Despite being a "clash of artstyles" indie game, I think what makes ENA work for me is how selective the art styles are - the 2D anim styles are pretty similar to each other despite being from different decades, and there's no photocollage or claymation or pixel art mixed in.
Reaction image that will be on every social media site for months once more people play this
This quest HUD animation is really good
Despite this game's ostensible point-and-click-adventure basis, the fact that it has multiple routes to the end and quite a good number of missable NPCs and dialogue in general feels like a pleasant departure from the usual linear expectations of the genre.
Favourite room in the game
I saw this and immedately thought of the NeXT logo
I wonder if it will be easier to get a bead on what this is "about" and where its heart is at, as the series progresses (this being only "chapter 1"), but as of now, there isn't quite that much to go on. (Contrast with, say, Anodyne 2's more focused imagery during its earlygame.)
One issue, though, is that so far it feels narratively/characteristically weaker than that, mainly due to most of the NPCs, and especially ENA herself, being duplicitous and enigmatic… her more grounded and relatable foil, Froggy, doesn't get that much screen time, either.