Secret Shadow Alliance of YouTube Stock Music Composers
http://tgwfa.meedean.com/ ā I like this style of awkward, painful dramaā¦ various shades of duplicitous people inexorably wheedling the passive but aware protagonistā¦ loaded with telling pauses and guarded emotions.
http://longexposurecomic.com/ ā This messed-up teen romance comic has pretty good nightmarish mood and flow. Though, it sometimes leans on boring Southern poverty stereotypes, or at least unsympathetic ones.
EXIT, PURSUED BY A BUFFER OVERFLOW
https://neodualism.deviantart.com/art/i-dont-know-i-was-really-drunk-at-the-time-719328339 ā Extreme RPG Maker aesthetic.
Here's a photo of a fashionable spider I saw.
*"tsuchinoko real" voice* "dermarolling real" *punches the "Send The It" button, only for the illusion to shatter revealing I've uttered the password of the family safe to the Inceptions* "Inceptionsss!" *stamps feet* "Y'all stole this idea from that one Don Rosa comic!"
(Content warning for some blood-spilling, and gory-looking prostheses.)
http://beatrizoverseer.tumblr.com/ ā This fantasy comic's first striking feature is its delightfully emotive, conniving swordswoman protag ā but alongside her comes some keen (although sometimes a bit densely-narrated) worldbuilding and a desaturated palette that sharpens rather than dulls.
http://awomanofdust.smackjeeves.com/ ā This short comic is a long dialogue between these two women, almost like minimalist theatreā¦ the character development is somewhat one-sided, and its pacing is a bit off, but it thrives within its limits and doesn't overexert itself.
http://lostnightmare.com/ ā This fairytale comic's a little thin at the start, but the art and plot progression give it simple charm.
Feels kinda like an ultra-condensed, sober Cucumber Quest, and not JUST because of a moral ambiguity between ornate, dream-themed characters.
"Your equipment levels down when you take damage. Your gun will level down to a starter-whistle. Your teleporter will level down into ventriloquism."
ME: "Refer to leftovers as "dinner remnants"."
COMPUTER: "That's a nice idea and all, but this is a TADS compiler."
The so-called "lost algorithm of the ancients" turns out to just be xor swap, which had been lost solely due to the ancients' compiler optimisations. Only your party's cyberpaleontologist is pleased.
The upper ten feet of the well is choked with shields and spears ā a crude attempt by the survivors, before their escape, to slow the creature's possible return.
Every other king who wore a crown know not that they carried into the future the symbol of the first king to wear one.
"We still call these mountains "islands", in memory of the absent ocean."
The zany part about this MAME test screen (Wild Western) is that if you squint you can see distinct light and dark bands of tiles rising upā¦ tile patterns running diagonally across time as well as area.
ā±ā01-12-2020 ā 02:03:43
The other contributing factor is how deliberately limited the otherworld is beyond it ā the inhabitants' lives have little to no resemblance to human lives, such that minor details like their clothes ā varied in style, achronal ā enhance the air of unreality.
I think a lot of this comic's uniqueness hinges on the design of the titular Skybox, which is shrouded in mystery for a third of the comic, and, while seemingly simplistic, is nonetheless incongruous enough to suggest much deeper mechanisms are at work.
ā±ā29-12-2017 ā 18:53:30
Easily my favourite twist of the year is "Mario Odyssey really is a Sonic game". Mwah. https://twitter.com/HgMorbi/status/939851393967407105
If by misfortune you become consciously aware of your blinking, you can distract yourself by becoming consciously aware of your breathing. This works both ways.
ā±ā30-12-2017 ā 02:29:19
http://skybox.webcomic.ws/ ā This otherworld comic is surprisingly compellingā¦ great feeling of tension and action, very unusual world that's constantly interrogatedā¦ good comic.
Final Fantasy 1 pulls a similar trick with the "leave town" line: in one town it is not where it should be, and a secret spell shop is hidden to the right.
It's very much designing against a limited vocabulary, akin to ROM hacks, but in the seminal game in a genreā¦ feels contemporary with Super Mario Bros.'s warp zone entrance, running inside the HUD.
I like how the oldest RPGs, including Dragon Quest 1 itself, often forced you to walk down a 1-tile gap between an obstacle and the invisible "leave town" line.
It explicitly re-casts a trivial act, leaving town, into something involuntary that must be deliberately avoided.
http://www.theduckwebcomics.com/Alien_Circus/4885722/ ā The main arc of this is rather generic, but the character designs and locations are pretty good, and the really zany thing is that this actually ends, after just 3 long chapters.
(Content warning for the occasional slur.)
http://www.starfellcomic.com/ ā Now here's a lovely shimmery-shiny silent-ish environmental comic.
Posting cute Dungeon Meshi panels on your public account is called "Delicious in Main". Next time someone else does this joke but phrased as "Who called it _ instead of _", just rememberā¦ it was meā¦
Aurora Borealis!
Slowly I turned,
step by step,
inch by inch,
Listen: 2017 took all the interesting AAA games for itself, so 2018 will have nothing but bad AAA games. Even worse than usual. Yes, even the new Kirby will be bad. Brace yourselves now and reduce disappointment.
The idea of letterboxing video by placing it atop a heavily blurred zoomed-in version of itself is a decent idea that's probably already turned into sheer kitsch, and will only grow worse as it ages.
I remain skeptical of A) the ease of teens obtaining livestock for one prank, B) the authorities remaining fixating on collecting all of them instead of quickly assuming whatever hypothetical remainder just escaped the grounds never to return.
So far two people have replied to the "what was the big incident at your high school" tweet with the misnumbered livestock prank, which was already a pretty well-known joke.
*is abruptly reminded that this is a legitimate Super Mario RPG screenshot* Uh,
"She'sā¦ so beautifā" *one of the extremely normal-sized flower petals blowing in the wind baps the fairy in the face*
*me fighting the Dragonlord* I wish he'd HURTLESS
"We're the only survivors of our planetā¦ it crashed into a much wealthier planetā¦ my ma clung to a ball of sizzling debris for a week, pressing her lips close to breathe the one inch of atmosphere it had leftā¦"
Cartoon about programmers that use Go or C++, called Land of the Rust-less. You think you can stop me, but as you'll soon see, my escape is already well underway. *viewscreen switches off, hatch opens revealing empty hangar and biplane roaring out into the clouds*
"The word "devils" only suggests the opponents of angels, and prevents us from having identities all to ourselves! We need something new. From now on, we'reā¦" *thirty seconds of thumbing through Wikipedia tabs* "ā¦"morlocks"."
Your patches have slowed to a trickle, the press has forgotten about you, and more and more of your player base is being eaten by your MOFPS rival, "You're Fricking Dead"ā¦ and the rumours inside your chat are that those that play it become fricking deadā¦ in real life!
"Sentenced to Hell for loving too hardā¦ but back on the surface after hinting to the pigs I knew a little somethin' about the most wanted sinning soul aliveā¦ well, it's more than a little somethin', if you know what I meanā¦"
"We extracted the client, but left a super-anachronistic crater and debris at the scene, so the boss is making us fill out thisā" *opens aircraft hangar doors to reveal a floodlit, churning ocean of flowing paper* "āand carry it to legal by hand, by tonight."
Two wizardbirds hurl frost toothpicks at a roguebird, who dodges swiftly enough to leave afterimages and dives into the birdbath full of wizardwater.
Robot debugging a smaller robot, frustrated with having to email a patch out of her brain and into their brain, instead just kisses the file into them.
"5:01 PM, winter solstice: the biggest night of the year. Startistician A17 has reported a missing star. Nyx's two best and soft-butchest agents are zooming to the scene. Suits: black. Hair: short. Truth-drilling gazes: irresistibleā¦ at least, judging by hers."
Human brain: Sonic Mania DLC that adds new stages
Titan brain: Sonic Mania DLC that just adds more cutscenes between stages
Hecatoncheires brain: Sonic Mania DLC that just replaces Blue Spheres with something else
*tips over first domino*
*second domino, upon being struck, instead glows red, launches through the air, and annihilates itself and the final domino in a massive explosion*
VOICEOVER: "Teleportation and FTL travel soon followed."
"Hey!"
*turns* "What?"
*wearing cowbell* "You just said you're hay." *grabs thick locks of hair and starts chewing lovingly*
"Royal flushes don't exist in real lifeā¦ but what if they did? The dark-comedic game "Poker" explores this scenario."
https://jelena-misljenovic.deviantart.com/art/Winter-VIII-657417837 ā Something about the highly ambiguous dark patch in centre, which I'm not sure is even meant to be a figure, is doing some numbers on me.
Grateful holiday blessings to everyone making "Boxing Eve" jokes
http://nothingfits.webcomic.ws/ ā This completed comic feels like its plot was mostly improvised (for bad and good), and is sometimes a bit too ambiguous about events, but it manages to be pretty evocative nonetheless.
"10km above Court Planet, a planet consisting solely of courtroomsā¦ My clients, all 20 billion of them, are oddly calm. Either the weight of a DEICIDE charge is lost on them, or they still think a downgrade to godslaughter is coming. Not when your victim is SATAN HIRSELF, buds."
"Hey! This "ripped stuffing" look takes a lot of work! Each bursting puffā" *gestures with steak-knife* "āis coated in just enough glue to keep it from shedding on everything, but not so much that it looks stiff or shiny! I care for my appearance more that you do yours!"
"This sacred swamp is geothermally warmed and fed by a constant stream of mud, so its slime is the perfect viscosity all year round." *sploshes in head-first, leaving a dent in the surface that doesn't go away*
"OK, I'm now 600 years in the past, and can confirm my phone has dropped toā¦ six bars?? Whatā" *phone gets call from "STOP TRYING TO UPSELL US ON MAINTENANCE FOR YOUR FUTURE JUNK, YOU FUTURE INFANTS" (not in address book)*
Leering at the new houseplant megalomaniacally
"Listenā¦ I didn't tell the whole truth when I said my golden power armour is fueled by my heart singing from the entire galaxy's happinessā¦ in realityā¦ it's fueled by my heart aching to end the entire galaxy's fear."
"It's still aerodynamic!" your witch ride reassures you, now that you're basically riding on her back as the fire, having fully consumed the broom's bristles, advances past the halfway point of the stick.
"The player begins with 5 basic cards (Pistol, Power of Suggestion, Cutie Jelly Jr., Extra Turn, and Vitus Phial). 197 other basic cards and 12 megacards were planned, but the developers allegedly "got bored" and built anti-gravity puzzle platformer levels instead."
"Its non-violent, pacifist gameplay combines stealth, parkour, bluffing, hacking, block-pushing, fishing, weapon-crafting, and a little something we call "sitting back and watching your character kill the enemies for you", to let you nimbly slaughter your way through
While only minutes passed in the Cave of Enlightenment, thirty years have passed outsideā¦ the world is changedā¦ all money has been replaced with "necrosouls", as has all food, and all energy! "Necrosoulsā¦ necrosouls!!" mutters a scavenging cyborg you recognise as your fatherā¦
An attachƩ carries a record player and, as the gaunt figure exits the carriage, lowers the needle. Recorded footsteps fill the air, not quite in sync with the figure's silent feet.
Realising years later that the printout of "your source code" your creators gave you is actually CSS from their company's site, and the part labeled "your soul" is just IE6 shims.
Me, pretending to remember what Christmas cheer is after so much fear and pain: Actually, getting lost in a phantasmal dream about having a family that loves you is probably the optimal thing to do when your last match goes out and you're dying in the snow.
"It is tradition for engravers "asked" to inscribe forbidden runes to carve every line correctly save the last one, which waves and dangles in a manner that ā before the law ā can in no way be deciphered by certain unseemly clients intent on adding its correction themselves."
The concept of demons-as-fallen-angels has a lot of baked-in irony that a lot of works just don't even bother capitalising on.
I like the idea of giving demons names in the style of angels, that they bore before their Fall, and which now darkly represent what they have lostā¦ Demons named Jubilation, Euphoria, Wonder, Epiphany, Levity, Bliss, Apotheosis, Joy
I also think about how one of the most visually powerful concepts of modern culture, the black hole, was brought to our imaginations from science and astrophysics. Theoretical astrophysics, at that!
Black holes came to fiction from MATHEMATICS.
Sometimes I think things like "would an alien civilisation on a world without rain or snowfall ever think up such an astonishing natural event, and more importantly, what weather could THEY have that our puny imaginations are missing out on"
If Adventure Time got an online WoW-like game, would it be called an "MMOoo"
*slow, miserable soft-shoe shuffle*
"Hehā¦ Suckers! I actually thought that joke ruled!!"
*vigorous, irreverent tap-dancing*
House brain: 42
Hotel brain: 413
Cathedral brain: 69105
Arcology brain: Chapter 16.5
Magnasanti brain: Post 217
http://winter-melody.smackjeeves.com/ ā This very abandoned comic was kinda slow, but it was speckled with loads of cute setpieces that endeared me to itā¦ alas!!
A lot of Bob The Angry Flower (http://angryflower.com/) is pretty hit-and-miss, but this one is still good.
Waterslide brain: Sonic Mania 2 with all original stages
Going down stairs in a swivel-chair brain: Sonic Mania 2 with all original characters
The new ARMS fighter is a better Moira than Moira. None of you will believe me but history will bear me out.
ā±ā15-11-2017 ā 21:12:58
I am neutral about "Megaman" vs "Rockman", although leaving the other half of the name pair, "Roll", unchanged is an eyesore, as is trading the thematically rich "Blues" for "Protoman" instead of something much less generic.
"Robotnik" was always a bad localisation name, reeking of stale Cold War semiotics and invoking Rocky and Bullwinkle, of all things. "Eggman" already resembles "egghead", suggesting evil genius. That's my belligerent gamepinion of the day.
http://magicalhazel.com/ ā This one doesn't have the most cohesive writing, nor very consistent art, but what there is does have pretty good colour and motion sense.
"We have finally apprehended the fiends responsible for proliferating the accursed "Tumblr Nose", and imprisoned their essences in a Mary Blair artbook bound in demon-hide."
*me looking at RPG Maker games* End Roll? More likeā¦ Startā¦ Rolling Your Eyes. At how edgelord it is. Deliver the living daylights out of this tweet, sweetie *I kiss the HTTP POST request on its header and bid it adieu as it soars out of my bedroom window into the fuchsia dusk*
I just tuned into an arbitrary stream of someone playing Kaizo Donkey Kong Country 2 and the puzzles are watering my mind and exploding my crops
http://www.ellieofthestars.com/ ā This story is awkwardly paced and rather structurally dubious, but it's visually decent and has a unique identity.
"Calculators are not native to your reality ā each occurrence indicates that arbitrary code execution was performed."
*jabs gun threateningly* "First, give me the bullets." *takes the bullet box* "Good. Second, look up which part of this gun is the lid."
She strides in, entropy dress trailing behind her, erasing the stairs, unstitching the welcome mat.
Grey-market "shrink ray" that just makes trombone-zooms happen
Dom that's trying to act aloof but is genuinely too tired to work up any insults, and ends up just sighing "whatEVER" at everything the sub does
The sports game of the year is Desert Golfing's PC release and the heartwarming pic of the year is this screenshot of Desert Golfing's system requirements
*I slowly shuffle towards Sonic Mania with a huge novelty Sequel Of The Year ribbon, but stumble sideways and press it onto Yo! Noid 2: Enter The Void, instead* Whoopsy golly, guess we hafta just leave it like this
"Santa Claus" originally referred to a skilled biblical hunter until the Coca Cola corporation started sarcastically using it to insult Elmer Fudd.
If you pantomime squeezing the juice from the single pomegranate that grew from the never-rotting body of the slain Earth-turning titan at the North Pole into your open mouth, it tastes like immortality.
Mandrake/Vampire couple sharing a century-long soil nap
Finding it hard even for me to appreciate the dark humour in the jarring disconnect between the affable, sunny self-description of the Ko-Fi app, and its users relying on it to supplement health and welfare expenses.
Favourite safe, popular OCRemix genre
*puts on glasses with game console memory cards instead of lenses* "Signing in to the data realityā¦"
I reject quotations that name only the speaker and not its context, because this format valorises their name above all, and implicitly supports Great Man theory and the other kinds of historical brand-worship. Please, name the poem, novel or speech too.
When you first beat NieR: Automata it shows "TRY AGAIN" with Dr. Eggman juggling the rest of the alphabet.
Like any emotional introspection, it can be unpleasant or impractical to fully disentangle. Until then, the work overshadows its tropes in your imagination, limiting your ability to envision or recognise them on their own, without a concerted gaze.
Becoming "well read", in any form, is about learning to detach the trope, to separate your love for it from the work, and to love (or, just as likely, stop loving) the work for how and why it imagines them ā its personality and philosophy.
Stories ā textual, visual or otherwise ā leave bigger impressions on you when you're younger or aren't familiar with their major tropes. You fall in love with something, thinking the tropes and the full work are one and the same.
I love this Sonic 3 & Knuckles level leaning hard into pop science-fiction movie imageryā¦ it deliciously complements the soundtrack in being sincerely 90s ā a decade energetically facing the 00s while reveling in nostalgia for the 80s.
I feel like the only situation which doesn't necessarily elicit this reaction is when the game is embedded in a publicly accessible web pageā¦ and, well, that platform isn't looking too healthy at present.
Gamers have been so entrained by decades of game criticism as product value-for-money, that on starting any game now, regardless of price, ownership or social context, they automatically believe on a purely subconscious level that they've already been charged $30.
Aliens need to stop recreating Human artifacts and locations from memory, with disturbing results, and start doing things the Human way: appropriating only the most marketable aesthetic details and mashing them up with their own generic signifiers of the exotic, with disturbing r
ā±ā28-01-2018 ā 20:50:33
Today I learned tomatoes, on arrival in Europe, were called the "wolf peach" due to their similarity to nightshade berries, which were believed to trigger lycanthropy when eaten.
Get your werewolf fics updated, folks ā who needs the full moon when you've got soups and burgers
Videogame boss that splits into three copies, but all of them have to keep gripping the one sword between them.
OK listen
they bring back Labyrinth Zone in Sonic Mania 2
but
Act 2 is just a palette swap of Scrap Brain Zone
http://bellintheocean.thecomicseries.com/ ā This is a very stark Little Mermaid comic, all of the original's love replaced with anger and alterior motives, and while its presentation is a bit dryā¦ it's pretty good.
Unrelatedly, Sonic Mania's engine makes it rather easy for VGMaps boffins to rip the levels, so you can hop on and enjoy things like this http://vgmaps.com/Atlas/PC/index.htm#SonicMania
*I check out Sonic CD screenshot maps* I don't know why they made a game called "Sonic Colors" when the real Sonic colors are right here, I mean wow.
""Executive function"? Baby, the only "executive function" I need is RegExp.prototype.exec(), so I can scrub data from this website's HTML without having to ask my supervisor for permission to install another npm dependency."
http://insidehollowmountain.com/ ā This one's abandoned, and the characters are pretty dull, but the environments aren't half bad, even if their influences are pretty obvious.
I don't know what recognisable genre/trope name is for stories like Iron Giant etc, about a town recluse, usually supernatural, who opens up to a gentle protagonistā¦ any ideas welcome.
http://onthecliffcomic.tumblr.com/ ā This is niceā¦ a lonely-monster comic starring scared awkward people.
Sonic Mania, incidentally, lets you skip the tally entirely, so it uses real timeā¦ which is very amusing, because it means the mandatory Puyo Puyo minigame, which pauses the in-game timer, is now a timed part of the speedrun.
Fortunately, most CD speedruns use only in-game time (letting them time-travel as much as they like).
The reason is, each act's score bonus tally, which is not skippable, does NOT increase linearly with time remaining, so you can lose real time if you finish too quickly.
Recently I read a Sonic CD review (https://medium.com/@morgankitten/sonic-series-sonic-cd-45e282b24c7f) that noted that the time travel mechanic ā where you warp between slightly changed versions of the current level ā would've been so good if it was instant, with no CD loads, to encourage its use in speedruns.
https://www.pixiv.net/member_illust.php?mode=medium&illust_id=27518904 ā Hmmmmā¦ yes, I agree with this image.
The Firefox ARG is the only true "Game of the Year" candidate because it has 2017 written all over it
Molecule brain: I wish they could call Sonic Mania "Sonic 4"
Atom brain: No, Mania is a reflection and response to the original series, not a continuation
Electron brain: No, because Sonic & Knuckles is Sonic 4
Boson brain: THEY SHOULDA CALLED IT SONIC 2 AS A SEQUEL TO SONIC '06
Arts major: Isn't this meme subversion just Creamsicle all over again
STEM major: What's Creamsicle
Arts major: Well,
https://www.pixiv.net/member_illust.php?mode=medium&illust_id=35110442 ā This account has a lot of these grainy, weathered cosmos-themed picturesā¦ giving them a certain kind of warmth and agednessā¦
When's the Nidhogg-style GOI fighting game. Sounds like *rubbing fingertips with thumb gesture* to me.
*watches Getting Over It footage* Oh, I love Hammerfight
Much like Santa and Coca-Cola, the concept of a "Disney Princess" was actually invented by the Disney corporation,
I also like the decision just for how it differentiates the game and its themes from Sonic 1ā¦ plants and seeds, even ones as transient as flowers, are great at representing time, or trans-human timescales.
I like that Sonic CD makes the enemy robots explode into flowers instead of animals, suggesting that Eggman, in the absence of animals, forced flowers to become robot pilots.
Unrelatedly, TIL that "Lake Victoria" and "Victoria Falls" are, contrary to childhood assumptions, very far away from each other. Thanks, colonial geography.
Of course, Afrofuturist and Afro-present-ist depictions from the AAA industry is still too much to hope in this decade.
I feel like Overwatch's Afrofuturist map didn't need them to invent a specifically newly-founded African city, while US and British locations are used as-is.
Today's Mario Odyssey irritation is that Cascade Kingdom is very obviously supposed to be Mosi-oa-Tunya (aka Victoria Falls), which casts a colonialist shadow on its lack of native inhabitants + Galaxy-style triumphalist Western music + generic dinosaur/caveperson theming.
Ghost therapists help determine the age of amnesic lost souls by ā with gentle warning ā swinging at their eyes. Those up to thirty years dead still flinch; those older let it pass through.
"Use the lever to pull the lever." *stares at text prompt for 30 seconds, camera switches to third-person revealing the player is an increasingly baffled dog*
*watches Sonic CD time travel mechanics footage* Oh, I love Eversion
The false moon built on the hills of Moonlight City looks cheap and laughable now that the Earth's sphere has reopened and the real moon is visible again, but in the dark decades it became too iconic to ever switch off.
ASCII art brain: indent with spaces
.JPG brain: indent with tabs
one-slide .PPT brain: no identing
emoji art brain: all code is minified at pre-commit to save server space
"Don't moveā¦ you've got something on yourā¦" *reaches over* "on your, uh, yourā¦" *reaches into your chest with water-ripple effect* "just, don't moveā¦" *pulls out tiny squirming homunculus with your voice and face* "okay, you're fine now." *shoves it into their mouth*
"I'm a knightā¦ which used to mean a lot of thingsā¦"
*snaps on bike helmet*
"but now it just means I'll keep you safe, with my heart and my weaponā¦"
*brandishes wooden hat-rack*
"and no matter where we go, wellā¦ you know the saying about where you hang your hatā¦"
"heyā¦ i'm feeling pretty awful rnā¦ if anyone wants to make me feel betterā¦ H a , h a , h a . . . that is impossible!!" *steel shutters descend over exits as spiked orbs fill the room*
Honestly the biggest sting is the non-relationship between Hydrocity Zone and any adjacent zones, because the original Sonic 3 transitions ā both in cutscenes and theming ā between Angel Island, Hydrocity and Marble Garden was so smooth and satisfying when I played it.
The bitterness in the Fruit of Knowledge of actually playing the classic Sonics is suddenly caring A HELLUVA LOT that the geographic relationships between the later Sonic Mania classic zones makes no sense and just flat-out isn't explained.
"Is it still "horny on main" if you're actually miserable while writing it?"
"Hello, every post on main implies that you're miserable while writing it."
Me: I wish I could justā¦ not have to sleep. Then, I could have gloomy late-night moods that last for entire days in a row.
Ring is a memorably discordant comic that nonetheless has some interesting parallels to this one scene in Undertale, and though the former predates the latter by 3 years, I'm certain the similarities are coincidental.
For a long time my only familiarity with Sonic 2's plot, or anything after the first 1.5 levels, was from either Let's Play Sonic 2 Special Edition, or this comic "Ring" by KC Green http://gunshowcomic.com/600
I feel even Galaxy was too focused on its own high-concept mechanics (unusual gravity) to the point of undernourishing its world and narrative.
Sunshine, at least, knew that FLUDD's appeal was far more thematic (waterpark fun) than mechanical.
Technically portals weren't that related to the themes of Portal itself (except in conveying "breaking out of expected boundaries") but that fact was missed by its inspirees.
Not to mention Braid took the opposite approach, spinning a huge vast allegory out of its mechanics.
I'm glad games have advanced past the era of Portal-likes such that Odyssey can put in an on-paper high concept like controlling enemies and machines, and not even make it that related to the theme of the game (tourism).
Me about to be stabbed by a Scottish greatsword: I wish he'd claidheamh less
Waiting with dread for Drip to slowly become the Facebook to Patreon's MySpace, with every single negative connotation that entails.
https://dali-puff.deviantart.com/art/Tsukumogami-Girl-Zorigami-390801182 ā This OC is pretty silly but I'm hyperfocusing on the cracks on and around the clock face, which suggest the amazing image of the clock face magically, sinisterly stretching into a heart shape, splintering the wood around it.
In 24 hours I'm letting this one rip unless I receive 10 grand.
"Cold medicine: if you drink it, your body heat will warm it up. As thanks for helping it, it will soothe some of your body's pains."
"Pleaseā¦ these cat ear hairbands are prescription." *turns around, opens up a SMTWTFS pill box, whereupon a tiny stretchy arm reaches out and gives a headpat*
Lawyer-themed boss that inflicts a suite of hitherto-unseen and dangerous-sounding status effects ā "Debilitated", "Curtailed", "Maligned" ā that on closer inspection don't actually do anything.
"We've detected traces of heart-shaped energy at the impact site."
"That's their gang's signature energy shapeā¦ Waitā¦ there's something else!"
"What? You don't meanā¦"
"There'sā¦ lipstick-mark-shaped energy?! Couldā¦ she have joined them?"
A marine species of intelligence visiting us would find humanity's inability to design consistent viddygame water physics painfully parochial
A similar feeling would emerge for us on seeing their games, which have very idiosyncratic spins on ground locomotion.
OK listen
they bring back Metropolis Zone in Sonic Mania 2
but
it only gets 1 Act this time
(This tweet is false. Sans has never made any food that he could easily order out from someone else.)
Whenever Sans proceeds to make spaghetti, it mysteriously develops more and more hot dog-like characteristics, until eventually all the pasta wheat has been chemically reconstituted into buns and all the sauce into ketchup.
Cucumber from Cucumber Quest should be a kappa. I've just decided this. He should have a bowl of water in his scalp with two bunny ears poking out of it like reeds.
60-miles-per-gallon brain: Sonic Mania 2 with all original levels
Just-staying-home brain: The "all emeralds" ending of Sonic Mania 1 is intended to directly lead into Classic Sonic's appearance in Sonic Forces, so technically, Sonic Forces _is_ Sonic Mani
Die Hard is now talked about in the context of "Christmas movies" more often and more passionately than literally any other Christmas movie. Unbelievable.
and while the effects mostly boil down to platforming mobility (extra jumps, extra platforms, teleporting, etc.) they're still fairly distinct from each other, and their differences are usually exploited by at least one puzzle.
Every level is based on a small set of unusual, evocative environmental tools (most often plantlife) that have non-obvious but discoverable interactions with yourself, your two mouse-controlled highly abstract abilities, or each other,
https://jleingang.itch.io/glum-buster - Glum Buster is such a nice old GM gameā¦ It's like an even mix of Another World (non-verbal, naturalistic alien world design and puzzles) and Seiklus (peaceful exploratory tone).
I'm gonna say it, and I'm gonna be rough: "internet radio" or "radio", should've continued to be the name for podcasts. It has symmetry with "video". It connects to the history of the medium. Loaded with rich imagery.
"Podcast" has an Apple product in its name for god's sake
Anywayā¦
I'm conflicted about that 5KRT tweet of the Kirby Super Star game over screen because I've had a much higher quality GIF of it available on my blog for the past 5 years (http://animatedscreenshots.tumblr.com/post/31685558557/kirbys-dream-land-kirbys-adventure) but I doubt it's healthy for me to be annoyed by things like this.
As a followup, I think "hours" is a mistype of "minutes", in that I couldn't find a Speedrun dot com category that has a #1 record of several hours (but several are at 6-8m).
Either that or this detail is a clue that this is all made upā¦ a possibility to keep in mind.
https://www.reddit.com/r/speedrun/comments/7hm7bj/new_minecraft_glitch_allows_you_to_skip_the_final/dqss8bp/ ā Negative consequences of the intersection of Minecraft and wealth, volume exty-ex
What once took twelve years is now over in six jabsā¦ but only pro-corporate ideas and history are part of the Injectucation Curriculumā¦
An underground alliance of endocrine hackers, punk librarians and street neurologists hope to grow an antidote that will literally go viralā¦
"Yes, the elevator car sometimes swings back and forth like a pendulum for no explicable reason. That's why piles of free coffee cup lids are on each floor. To keep things like this from happening. This was ALL in your employee handbook, you know."
*pan to patch of flowers wearing sunglasses* "The year is 17DCā¦"
*shot of sign reading "Speed Limit: 56K"*
"ā¦17 Dot Com."
*pan up to a huge metal close box on a skyscraper*
That talking crown wasn't the true cause of the Tribute Dragon's endless hunger for gems, you realise as its centrepiece jewel, the Tempting Topaz, rises from its shattered frame and stirs the massive gem pile beneath you with ancient wordsā¦
Ghost City is in a crisis! A dreadful ghoul, the Spooklich, has made them too frightened to go up to Living City and scare the wicked every night! But maybe all the Spooklich needsā¦ is one brave soul to show it the one thing it fears the most!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n-o9Zt2kH84 ā There's a new Cuphead speedrun glitch that skips the Results scoring screens, but no one wants to do it because, as shown, it turns playing the game into Utter Hell
Sonic CD patch that renames the "Past" and "Future" signs to "Last Tuesday" and "Next Tuesday".
AR glasses placing its own "software update available" button on your chest, and your own vital sign indicators in a misaligned float div next to your right thigh.
"Yeah, if you stay awake after midnight in this hotel, time stops flowing until you kill all the ghostsā¦ using this."
*hands you pizza cutter*
"Just remember: they'll only rest if their Sorrow and their Joy get equal slicesā¦ you'll know what I mean."
https://creatorofall.deviantart.com/art/Flatwoods-661655960 ā This posing and composition is very good for an otherwise basic character drawing.
https://blinkpen.deviantart.com/art/Sweetwater-609440016 ā This character design is fun (esp. the limited, slightly morally suspicious palette) but the swagger of the top pose completes it for me.
Super Metroid miscellaneous speedrun categories
"We're approaching Rolling Townā¦ or ratherā¦ it's approaching us."
"Amazingā¦ is it really a whole town of treehouses inside one giant tumbleweed?"
"They're a dizzy folk, but big-hearted and wise."
Tearing the vines off an ancient stone door, sliding open the door, stepping in, sliding shut the door, and replanting all the vines on the other side.
WEDGE: "This energy signatureā¦ pure mechanical advantage! Could it beā?!"
PULLEY (whilst bursting from mountainside): "Hehā¦ two thousand years ain't enough to make you stop wanting me, eh?"
The opening stages of each classic Sonic and the hyperfocus on it by 3D Sonics misled me for years.
Earlier this year when I watched Sonic Mania streams and saw levels like Stardust Speedway, which isn't even an original zone, I couldn't believe my eyes.
I talked about this before but Green Hill Zone and its descendants are so absolutely not what the classic Sonic aesthetic is "about" that it isn't even funny.
Unrelatedly I tried to rewatch the "tower of 13 Sonic & Knuckles carts" Vines but @necrosofty's Vines are all deleted :(
How many kids do you think got Sonic 3 but never got to lock it into Sonic & Knuckles. It's probably a lot.
Smart coaster constantly overheating due to cryptocoin-mining botnet is incorrectly interpreted as a drink-warming feature, leading to transmission of said feature to entire smart glassware cupboard.
The damage triangle is Top Hat Magician <- Jeans Magician <- Silver Leotard Magician <- Top Hat Magician. Each defeats the last in perfect balance.
I hope the generation of cats that millennials are having because they can't afford kids will pass on their families' human heritage to their cat descendants.
The sooner zany surprise marriage proposals are bled out of the zeitgeist, the sooner prenegotiated scripted public marriage proposals can be added to the already sagging pile of exhausting performative theatrics the Western traditional marriage is founded on. It's win-win.
That sentence isn't just about the clarity or agility of your creative vision, but also its resilience ā whether it will keep from being worn down or clouded over during the long road to completion.
In that light, it asks "you have several ideas, but are you also capable of producing thousands of ideas, of varying sizes, for varying purposes? Is your creativity fertile and consistent enough to produce in abundance?"
With respect to the latter, I like to crease the original proverb by thinking of execution as just a long chain of much smaller ideas ā individual words, lines, notes, forms, sequences, everything to fill the gaps and carry the loads.
Saw some tweets dwelling on the proverb that "ideas are nothing, execution is everything", "execution" referring both to the labour of creation and to the act of directing ā of every tiny decision made during creation.
I'm making a note here: "sweet and cold",
http://simpleinelegantcomic.com/ ā This comic is OK. Mainly I like how brief and discrete each scene is, giving its narrative a lean, staccato feel.
I'm annoyed that Olmec heads are always evil in videogames. They don't deserve this treatment.
I feel oddly about Your Character Here templates ā they appeal to me as instances of pure composition, most other context abstracted away.
But, consuming them as works in themselves seems counter to their intent as advertisement of and liminal state for the final product.
https://desireeu.deviantart.com/art/Hourglass-YCHs-CLOSED-574020465 ā Tag yourself I'm #1 wishing I was #5
Ice Cap Zone 1 in particular felt way more like a series of Half-Life 2-esque physics puzzles than a 90s platformer level (to the point of discord with what platformer elements there were, such as the enemies and the time limit).
It's making me realise that classic Sonic is anachronistically interested in physics and motion in general, even moreso than many physics-themed games like Half-Life 2 or the mid-00s Flash puzzle games.
I'm actually non-trivially playing Sonic 3&K for the first time and I'll admit I'm impressed at how many different mechanical devices you interact with ā lifts, swings, spinning tops, gears, each seemingly unique to their zones.
33ā
rpm brain: Sonic Mania 2 with all reused Genesis levels
480rpm brain: Sonic Mania 2 with all new levels
50,000rpm pulsar brain: Sonic Mania 2 with all reused levels from Sonic Mania 1
https://horaro.org/rrlat/2017 ā This is a speedrun event called the "Really Really Long-a-thon". (Small excerpt pictured)
Suddenly imagining a Sonic game where instead of rings he can create a basic shield anytime by being in ball form for more than 5 consecutive secondsā¦ spindashing on the spot can provide it, but so can just rolling naturally through levels.
Contrast with something like Yoshi's Island, where your "hits" (the Baby Mario timer) replenish back to 10 when undisturbed, making prolonged survival feel more natural.
Games like SMW and Sonic where your lost defense items can situationally be picked up again with no hard limit always felt kind of messy to me.
Endlessly picking up the same ring or Yoshi feels like gaming the system in a humiliating way rather than an interesting way.
The biggest difference between them is how much focus the SMBs give their powerups compared to S3's shields: they're available in most levels, and you can stockpile them.
They're, of course, Mario's only defense in most games, with the closest Sonic rings analogue being Yoshi.
I just noticed the obvious fact that Sonic 3's shields are the equals to SMB's powerups but approached from opposite directions: the Mushroom and Fire Flower are abilities that incidentally provide an extra hit, and the shields are extra hits that incidentally provide abilities.
"Distinction btwn fairies and angels primarily size ā poss. gigantism of latter due to lack of high-altitude predators; colouration habitat-specific; following either into "another world" universally bad idea."
Staring intently through cafeteria glass at cakes while AR vision fills with crowdsourced Deliciousness Rating popups with laggy AJAX spinners