New favourite Castlevania boss is this werewolf woman who doesn't stop ripping things apart https://youtu.be/MwkKuolGG7Q?t=1796
"I'd not seen another grown woman in my life… I only saw myself in mermaids, harpies and dryads, and thought my shape was a monster's shape"
"Heh… I've been seduced by the women in your family line for 7 generations… you're the real insatiable immortals, and I the hapless maiden!"
"Only 5 hours sleep, and my critical thinking is down. If the kids announce fairies are real, I'll be all "hell yeah" and update Wikipedia."
"At one border, guards were still saving digitised travelers to USBs, walking ten feet, and plugging them into the other nation's internet."
So, by fortune, "any%" can be defined in contrast to "low%", and thus this seemingly inapplicable name can remain meaningful.
This is interestingly applicable to the Castlevanias and Marios – while powerups are temporary, one can still abstain from collecting them.
"Low%" requires collecting as few powerups as possible – and thus winning with as weak a character as anyone can humanly manage.
So, it would seem the "any%" name is meaningless for such games.
However, it can be contrasted with another Metroid-derived name, "low%".
However, in arcade games with no warps like Castlevania I or IV, you must beat all levels to win, and powerups are unrelated to progress.
The notion of "%" derives from the Metroids, where it refers to your percentage of powerups collected (and thus areas explored).
Speedrun boards usually name the "do anything to win as fast as possible" ruleset "any%", even if the game doesn't have a meaningful "%".
(He even points out the narrative symmetry – that he finally gets to return the favour to Ib, rescuing her rose as she did when they met.)
What makes Together Forever work is that Garry really needs to die in order to complete his otherwise rather shallow character arc.
I feel the most narratively satisfying ending is Together Forever, but also appreciate World of Guertena for humanising the minor creatures.
Unfortunately, a lot of the game's mood invites the player to implicitly accept Garry when he dismisses her as just a deceitful killer.
Which is a shame, as she's the most, and I dare say only, interesting character in the cast – a human monster among monsters.
Additional Ib notes: despite having favourable endings for both, the game feels consistently less sympathetic to Mary compared to Garry.
"I need more narrative space between this setup and this twist. What if I describe them solving a block puzzle for one chapter."
"How to make this moment more cathartic… One of the characters removes their coat to reveal a t-shirt with a mind-bending lifehack on it."
"Only an average of three tweets from me a day… blink and you'll miss 'em. That's why I always make sure they aren't even that good."
"Welcome to Forest Mountain Valley Lake Desert, which, much like its name, is a roller-coaster of disappointment."
"Time to download the life experiences my uploaded AI copy had while running at 500x speed." *clicks* "…Gee, that's a loooot of breakdowns."
"We promised we'd never grow old."
"The same APIs."
"No bugs, only features."
"Forever and ever."
"Fairies can make you believe you're a toad or a boot or a tree, and without objects that prove you're human, you'll never stop believing."
＿人人人人人人＿
＞Sudden death＜
￣ＹＹＹＹＹＹ￣
Cause:[Tried to turn off the cold and hot shower taps at once, but forgot they go in opposite directions]
Tsuppari Oozumou. Possibly the most high-definition sports crowd on the Famicom?
The cave-dwelling gnome actually uses "mushroom" to refer to any fungus or plant, and the "giant mushrooms" they promised were really trees.
"It's not narcissism that made me release" "a contagion that transforms everyone into myself." "I just wanted" "to make UX testing easier."
"Eh? Worried about me wearing a hot wet bathrobe in the snow? Relax." *empties thermos of hot coffee over head* "I got three more of these."
"How can a featureless sphere be a "mom"? It doesn't make s-" *face quivers as The Change surges through their brain* "Tuck me in, orbmom."
"It's just safety padding, like when you pile dozens of spears onto glassware to keep it from rolling around in the box."
What if – wait for it – what if – bear with me – what if someone did a NES game review show using only known bad ROM dumps
I'm glad Dr. Zarei in the webcomic Paranatural is continuing to put in work to be the most entertaining conniver in the comic.
and that its strength, even as it waned during the story, kept it the focus of combat tactics, the silent soul behind the main character.
Regarding the rest of the game: I liked that most of its aesthetics, from the name down, were themed around its only nonverbal party member
This particular game is spared this by its thankful brevity, but still, the limits of the system are apparent by the end.
Without a large or malleable economy of health/damage/statuses to manage, as in something like Pokémon, it can very easily bottom out.
And in some way, I understand: "pure" TBC is actually pretty dry - strategy games with only a few units, and lacking even grid movement.
I observe that this particular subgenre of RPG is so unexplored that I needed to provide this much description instead of a name.
#IPlayed The Heart Pumps Clay (https://rpgmaker.net/games/6541/) A turn-based-combat strategy game with no experience levels or consumable inventory.
Acknowledging the fact that your body doesn't work like bodies should, that some remote number keeps it standing and can bid it fall down.
Physical harm is so important to so many games yet is abstracted away to the stars, so I like it when games make that abstraction diegetic.
And indeed, the most striking threats are those that solely damage the rose – the mouths that eat flowers, the childish loves-me-not games.
It really doesn't want to be a blood-splattery game, with such clean magic front and center, so its splattery moments generally ring false.
The key to Ib is how it equates physical injury to the rose losing petals – violence abstracted away both in the interface and in-world.
#IPlayed Ib. I found it least impressive when it tries to be gory and gruesome (which is often) and in its own when it's strange and sad.
"Tell me you didn't hire zany mercenaries for wedding security."
"Only the rich ones?"
*the Floor Trader strafes past, shooting ticker-tape*
"I can't find Pingu in the claymation category." "Yeah, sorry, Pingu is real, it's all edited live footage."
The poker-themed fighter is trying to mod a pack shuffler to feed cards through a knife sharpener. Several bent and torn packs surround her.
"You drive - I'm taking a nap." *rips off motorcycle handlebars and tosses them at the person in the sidecar*
"I restitched my pillow myself, but I think I got the wiring plan backwards, because now I wake up with dozens of baby teeth under it."
"I warp space-time, because anything passing me…" *flicks hair* "…can't help but turn to look!"
*a pen flies off a desk and hits their face*
Insomniacs getting into plush transformation solely so a friend can make them fall asleep instantly, Mr. Bean style.
What I like about this is that the seemingly arbitrary inclusion of Toad unexpectedly reveals the scene's true context. https://twitter.com/_inktho/status/778502563565965312
"Your ultimate move, that you charge up for so long… is just basic healing?"
"Look, self-care sometimes takes a lot of effort, OK?"
Visions of your friends grown old, and yourself among them in your same old metal body – no frailer, no wiser, no maturer than today.
Teens at the bus stop talking about their most fortunate critical hits, their boots and gloves faintly stained with ichor.
"Here's the best manuscript I ever received, glued to my head so it can always be near to my brain. I still rewrote all but 5 sentences."
"Three whole chapters? Don't you realise that when I said you should cut down to just three, that was an implicit challenge to go to two?!"
"The key to editing is: if any page doesn't make you say "hell yes", out it goes!" *opens manuscript* "Hell yes hell yes heck yes–" *riiip*
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uchide_no_kozuchi – Magic hammers in RPGs, in particular ones that cause or cure shrinking, refer back to this specific hammer.
(In short, this means that "perfect" play in a few SMB1 levels actually permits more human error and variation than you might expect.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PInZ2-qfKEU&t=4m41s –Explanation of framerules in SMB1 speedruns, which mean most levels' clear times are essentially debounced by 0.3s.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fj9u00PMkYU – *listens to every step of the opening summary* Yeah!
"You can't play a wind chime by just shaking it. The music isn't complete without the howl of the wind and the roar of rustling leaves."
"When I moved here, I had to rent an apartment above an indoor cemetery, and get by running a one-person roller rink in the living room."
"Breathe through my nose? But isn't that where snot comes out?"
*all the humans nod in grave silence, while all the AIs grin smugly*
"True fashion power is wearing a skirt, then ripped jeans, then another skirt, under the ripped jeans."
"Dogs and ducks have a similar mix of goofiness and mystery, but ducks, with their unexpressive beaks, elude human legibility a bit more."
"Humans gain wings when they turn into angels… dogs get a single muscly arm that lets them throw balls by themselves."
My first day back to Game Maker after about 2 years of just Javascript, and maybe the clash of paradigms is obvious.
"This sucks" *remembers the ex that liked to say "this sucks"* "This sucks" *remembers another ex that liked to ironically say "this sucks"*
"To assuage complaints that the cutscenes aren't sufficiently interactive, you can now spin the camera or roll it upside-down at will."
The chopped base of a beanstalk, its tip still snagged on a drifting cloud, slams into a farmhouse, sending timber and roof slats flying.
Scientists coaching teams of their own clones in the misremembered rules of football as the latest chapter of a laboratory rivalry.
"In humanity's absence, all our infrastructure has been claimed by voles… Their traditional title of "Earth's true inheritors" come true…"
The galaxy's leadership, vowing to "solve this universe thing once and for all", orders humanity to search for answers on planetoids W to Z.
"I don't dare masturbate until everyone else on Earth has been raptured away, and isn't coming back for at least two hours."
Designing protagonists for a long story is like conjuring what you, so innocent, foolishly thought would be your ideal best friends forever.
All the cannons in Bob-omb Battlefield shoot water. The soldiers are all bob-ombs. Perhaps they intend to prevent each other from exploding?
Current thing on my mind: Maria's cartwheel https://youtu.be/nwyskbFczUQ?t=1278
The slime giant is currently just a pile of heads and butts – each a slime that wanted to be the head, or the butt.
"Don't you hate it when you do a quest to stop someone powering up," your foe says while powering up, "and you forget to at least enjoy it?"
"You're looking great," you blurt out to the first boss. "All thanks to Hell Difficulty," she replies, her arms toned, her insecurity gone.
"I don't know what animal I am," lamented the ???girl. "It's probably long extinct, never seen by humanity. A part of me, forever unknown."
Wizards unscrewing the tips of their spellcasting fingers and pouring sulfur and chopped mandrake root directly into them.
"Boy! It sure would be awful if any of you had a really itchy itch right now!" she bellowed in the statuary.
"Phew, six hours on my feet. Time to relax." *detaches and throws legs into increasingly large pile in corner of room, unwraps a fresh pair*
"Being killed by your own creation isn't so ironic… Do we not create our enemies? Unknowingly carve their shields, sharpen their blades?"
＿人人人人人人＿
＞Sudden death＜
￣ＹＹＹＹＹＹ￣
Cause:[Forgot what array methods return new arrays, and which look like they do but really mutate in-place]
Not the Game Boy Camera "Who are you running from?" face. (source: http://www.pixiv.net/member_illust.php?mode=medium&illust_id=57344995)
"No…" whispers the party healer, "Why oh why did the bard have to learn a hot dance right before we dump them and recruit a second knight"
"Even the Dark Archway Fails account is posting duckling GIFs now. Please, just post crappy lopsided dimensional gateways. I'm begging you."
Your friends constantly referring to "our Cate, not the other one" and only darkly repeating "you know… the Other Cate" with no elaboration.
but I don't feel the assertion that it takes a WALL-E style turn to mediocrity after the boats.
It felt continuous. I liked it quite a bit.
Of course, Koram's backstory was shoved in rather late, and the second half was definitely more action-y magical spectacle than the first,
Maybe I'm too familiar with the tropes, but the second half's events with the god Soma and Koram and the egg seemed decently explained.
I watched the movie A Tree of Palme, and… I don't really get most of the flak it cops?
"The mage had to either buy the spell that raises Evade or the spell that raises Dodge, and I'm helping her come down from the panic attack"
"Thank you. Unless I'm forgetting something extremely important, I can go to the afterlife now." *departs in human form with pants missing*
"A mysterious untouched banquet in an abandoned castle… better boil it to get the curses out." *dumps layer cake into bucket*
"The rules for internet fame are simple and firm:
Always
Be
CDEFGonstantly
Hyperactive"
"I've been stuck as a human before, and trust me: your mind will edit out the blinks after a few weeks."
*cradling the party warrior's head* "Someone showed her you can see the moon during the day, and now she's all tuckered out from amazement."
"I… I have a head parasite, too." *removes hat, which has an MP3 player, miniature posters and cushions sewn onto the inside*
*walking past a century-old portrait of teens that look just like them, right down to smartphones* "This mansion's a waste of an afternoon."
"And then I ran up and…" *nurse lifts bandaged arm an inch* "BOFFO! I faded back and…" *nurse bends ankle five degrees* "KA-WHOOMP!"
Generations of silent, vigilant watchers, using the law about watched pots never boiling to withhold a supervolcanic eruption.
"Nice town, very leafy. The clock tower chime wipes your memories of the outside world each noon, buuuut I already use videogames for that."
"So I'm… just your psychic projection? Your mind is keeping me alive?"
"Y-yeah."
"Sweet!" *opens the second pack of potato chips*
I'm glad there's finally glitch symmetry between the any percent ending and this variant 100 percent ending.
https://youtu.be/IaRSSDiqUmc?t=11891 – In speedruns with skips, you can sometimes do plot events out of order. Anyway, here's the final boss of OoT.
"I just read people hyperbolically attributing minor medical benefits to things, and it regrew my nail cuticles and raised my saliva's pH."
"Promise me… when we do get out of this world and back to our own… you'll do my homework for a year?"
"No!"
"Ha! I knew you still had hope!"
"Why don't you make a private account with friends you trust?"
"Trust? Trust?" *eyes darting* "Trust?" *hopping around room* "Trust? Trust?"
"As we grow older, names tend to slough off. I've left surnames on the floor of hairdressers, let nicknames gurgle away in bathwater."
"Nice of this morgue to give us adjacent slabs."
"I don't think the immortality's kicking in for me."
"I'll kick you once my legs regrow!"
"Our bodies are changing."
"All bodies are always changing! But ours aren't missing the chance to grow horns and wings when we're young."
I'm a little sad it's too late to do a Homestuck Green Sun themed account, "Flash Of Cascade" ("413, THIS")
"So… which of us owns the party's gold?"
"We have even share."
"But… the 1-gold drinks… only one of us bought that… and it hella wasn't me."
"The humans called them "power cubes" and "power orbs". To think! The only feature their pitiful senses could distinguish was their shape!"
"For so long I saw staying up past midnight an impossible task, that when I did it at age 13, I felt sick with power, thought myself a god."
"Yeah, encasing you in these crystals is pure anxiety. You weak playthings can't even touch me, yet I treat you like a threat! Forgive me."
You open the battle menu and find that the tenacious raccoons following your party have added various made-up dual techs with you and them.
I actually tried this in my code, and was sad that I had to differentiate the variables and not be sickeningly twee.
Still liking this Smashbro pro's nametag for Samus
http://www.pixiv.net/member_illust.php?mode=medium&illust_id=55770174 – Broken armour reveals the woman is slime.
I'm glad the general store in Undertale is increasing its popsicle varieties.
https://youtu.be/LPDtoTMwAkY?t=527 – After losing all but one of your party members, the last party member just… slowly walks away… leaving no one left
Soldier: "That mech-suit… it only fits my lover's body, who died 20 years ago."
Stranger: *trying to stuff waist inside for dramatic reveal*
Spy: "OK… who ISN'T in this tournament to investigate its evil organisers?"
Boxer: "I'm here for the money."
The rest: "The money's a lie!"
https://modarchive.org/index.php?request=view_by_moduleid&query=48619 – How many Game Maker games used this exact music file? I know it's more than just uin (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2gWApCIvVXI).
I like how you can partly fix the spelling of the Xcalber by equipping it.
*think's with a grocer's apostrophe about how much I love Final Fantasy 1 attacks hitting nothing if a teammate killed the enemy first* Yeah
as solid as waking, yet malleable as a dream, with the characters cast for a moment as dreamers, or miniature gods.
I really like how it affects both the fiction's portrayal of magic - as pure expression, an extension of self - and the world itself,
Or, for a better example, everything that happens in the webcomic Minus, if you read that when it was online.
Like… bad example, but whenever Mallow's tears bring rain in SMRPG and Mario reacts to it, with the rain portrayed as a real event.
I think one of my favourite uses of magic in fiction is reifying cartoonish or surreal visual metaphors for emotions, reactions and wants.
I'm so glad there are codes for all three varieties of mon.
"The standing desk experiment has taken a turn… I wasn't ready for the freedom of unlimited butt access… I can't keep my palms off myself…!"
"I'd let her slam my hand in a car door."
"I'd let her fast-forward through the game center segments of Game Center CX."
"The spiral pupils… thing? Yeah… I've been hypnotised… for twenty years… Made to act… like a human… for a party joke… that kinda backfired…"
She points to the eyebrow without a ring. "Pinch it." You do so. "Thanks, I needed the symmetry." She leaves your hand there for a week.
"Imagine your own face reacting to a wonderful surprise." You try, but even the idea of a wonderful surprise is far beyond you.
"As for the princess…" *deliberately adjusts hair to cover the gold circlet that had until now gone unnoticed* "…she was never seen again."
*phone loading screen is image of dog jowls flapping in wind* "Finally, my home dimension" *turns on TV to watch dog jowls flapping in wind*
http://animatedscreenshots.tumblr.com/post/149997194770/super-metroid – There's something uniquely 16-bit about these secret attacks… The era of orbiting spherical particles…
In Super Castlevania IV, it's customary to end the run on a freeze-frame with the 3 crosses forming "the Triforce": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p0V_E7-Zefk&t=1915
Thinking about specific performative rituals and traditions in speedruns… not time-related strats, just things used to fill input breaks.
"Customer bothering you on your shift" is well and good, but consider "a stranger picked up a sidewalk coin before you could".
Tip: if you're writing a simple revenge hard-vore story, feel free to go ahead and make the revenge reason as petty as possible.
"Red cellophane lets you experience berserker fury whenever you want… green cellophane is for super serene philosopher fury."
Politely waiting for your celebrity guest to finish their mouthful of your flesh before asking them the next question
"Hey, any followers want a candy?" *tosses it into computer screen, which ripples like water* "Another day of life in the 2000s…"
This is yet another insufferably oblique Beatles reference, right
*draws Bubbline granddaughter OCs marrying Korrasami granddaughter OCs* No… this is too powerful… *squints as fingers turn to golden light*
I'm blessed whenever I remember there's a Super Metroid speedrunning strat that is literally just Samus flexing as much as humanly possible.
Castlevania could have, for instance, Whip → Dagger → Axe → Cross → Water → Invisible, and buying the same subweapon upgrades it.
Anyway, I find myself missing this feature in other Konami games like Contra and Castlevania, which would still be well-suited to it.
Parodius added a fun wrinkle with the "roulette" capsule, which makes the cursor spin by itself, and adds a "!" icon which removes powerups.
Additionally, temporary powerups like the shield can be primed by placing the cursor on them, and then bought at an opportune moment.
Its main draw is letting you save up for stronger upgrades, or get weaker ones early and often, regardless of the levels' whims.
This was where you collect capsules to simply move a cursor around a ring of powerup icons, and press a button anytime to "buy" the powerup.
Why didn't every 80s Konami action game have the Gradius powerup bar in it. It's easily one of the series's most beloved mechanical features
And, it seamlessly works with "is in", too, without having to do anything: "all of $arr2 is in $arr".
As you can write "1st of $arr" currently, you can now write "all of $arr", and perform "contains" on that: "$arr contains all of $arr2"
But, I hit on an alternative: add "any"/"all" properties to sequentials, that changes the semantics of the existing "contains" operator.
However… while "$arr contains all $arr2" is prefix, the "is in" version would be annoyingly circumfix: "all $arr2 is in $arr".
The original plan was for these to be unique, atomic operators, extensions of the current "contains" and "is in" operators.
So I might as well talk about things I'm adding to Twine 2… Just now I implemented "contains all" and "contains any" operations.
http://www.pixiv.net/member_illust.php?mode=medium&illust_id=38499908 – A worrying stampede of animate objects.
http://www.pixiv.net/member_illust.php?mode=medium&illust_id=46272145 – See that city? You can go there.
Has someone done an erotic Metroid fic that equates edging with holding onto a stored shinespark charge
"Hang on, let me write out a deed… there! Now I own your body – so instead of drudgerous self-care, you're pampering one of my possessions!"
"I drank a glass of water and quelled my only remaining drive. Feel free to roll my body into the corner while I wait to get thirsty again."
"The sooner you cry, the sooner you'll stop crying!"
"B-but I'm s-still crying."
"If it takes a week, a month, you still want a head start!"
Am I misremembering or is this literally a Monkey Island cutscene
http://www.pixiv.net/member_illust.php?mode=medium&illust_id=53468993 – Sawshark gijinka
http://www.pixiv.net/member_illust.php?mode=medium&illust_id=53357066 – This expression… pray you never see or give it.
"We agreed we weren't in love. Did you lie?"
"Would I lie to my love?"
*train doors close, and they depart, forever*
"…well, I know I did."
Pamphlet "So You Just Noticed All Your Executive Function Has Gone Out The Window" with full text on outside to save you having to open it