Leon's Microblog – March 2020

The "Betty Boop's author insert husband" webcomic and the "Nermal from Garfield as a zoomer trans egirl" webcomic are both nefariously messing with me
Platformer where the message "THIS ISN'T HOW REAL LIFE PHYSICS WORKS" is displayed onscreen every time you use the arrow keys to adjust your momentum in mid-jump.
Videogame whose skill tree is actually just a dialogue tree for an unknown unseen character called "Mr. Skill" who tries to give you affirming, encouraging pep talks, but always centered around unlocking more and more of the tree instead of the game's actual narrative.
*does a bunch of wacky stuff that leverages the deceptive nature of prose, such as, for instance, bursting into a room and you not being able to see me, then bursting into another room and becoming visible, thus revealing that the previous room wasn't the one you were also in*
Tournaments everywhere on hold, pros trapped in online Smash, Little Mac finally rises to mid tier
"Has anyone actually succeeded in putting the entire potato back together from one of those chip bags?"
The Western cultural aversion to face masks is exemplified by the heroic science fiction work Half-Life 2, whose protagonist Gordon Freeman faces aliens called Headcrabs that exclusively attack the human head, and yet refuses to wear any head prote
Shareware version of a game that's completely identical to the full version except for a mouse cursor shape permanently fixed on the screen slightly off from the centre
"kicking ass and taking names" inexplicably contracted into "naming asses"
Bringing out all the ancient and history-purged luck amulets – blue corn kernels, heart-shaped lilypads, perfectly straight toenail clippings, paradoxical ring-strands of hair, Bibles inexplicably bound with two bookmark ribbons
Hey there Magic: The Gathering players, come check out my "vintage cube" *smugly unveils a GameCube with the GB Player attachment*
The so-called "last natural photo of the stars" in Habitation Sector 8 was suspected by a scant few of only depicting satellites, but it was emblematic of a distant, beautiful past regardless.
You count thirty shadow-selves in the apartment today. Two in the hall, nine in the living room, seven in the combination kitchen-laundry-shower, and twelve in the bedroom. Some of the new ones barely resemble you.
Sleeping bravely
"It's all very simple. Earth orbits the Sun, and one orbit is a year. The Moon orbits Earth. Therefore, one month on the Moon equals one year on Earth. This forms the basis of Einstein's "Twins Paradox"…" *slowly marches over to laptop to click to the next the slide*
*tries to type "Truth Staying In Her Well. Is this anything. Anyone." but accidentally places fingers one letter to the right on the keyboard, and instead types "I'm a fluffy little bunny who needs LOTS of LOVE", thus catastrophically turning the subtext into text*
I reject the notion, common in cartoons and games, that witch magic would ever involve spinning circular rings of glowing midair runes. Witch magic is the magic of nature, intuition and the inhuman. The rings would be potato-shaped.
I'm still taken aback that a serious video effects processing device was called "the Video Toaster" and that the 30-minute promotional Ken Nordine video about it wasn't a joke.
Considering it's pretty much always downhill, I think the number of cursed objects that drag people to the Underworld is a bit much.
You all know what to do, folks: open your Itch wishlists and claim all the games with "100% off" disaster sales, and then don't even click "download" afterward because you're too stressed to actually play anything
Dark Souls did a lot of small things to the zeitgeist all at once, but did it really bring back cool location intertitles?? Did everyone just not care about location intertitles between Ocarina Of Time's release and 2012?
Personally, though, I think my favourite among these games is "HappyFace", a Minesweeper clone that gradually turns out to be nothing of the sort, all of its gamelike structures disintegrating into meaninglessness, as if a dream.
Additionally there's also an entire "GDC talk" by the creator about the fictional history of Collide Fish, which is by itself about as funny as most of Frog Fractions 2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=55qQbAGF2zE
Everything Is Going To Be OK's desktop sims have a lot of very deliberately bleak programs and games, though I think this one, simply called "Collide Fish", is individually the funniest.
One other thing I want to do is actually figure out a noun name (comparable to "link" for "click") for these latter two interaction elements… I added their macros to Harlowe years ago, pretty much entirely because the jQuery events for them were there.
Browsing the MODArchive 2007 torrent by filesize is rather wild. This (https://modarchive.org/index.php?request=view_by_moduleid&query=141984) 5MB xm file is a death metal track with fully voiced lyrics, and built-in liner notes in the instrument names. At this point it's basically just an MP3 file, with built-in liner notes.
The "disenchant" column is what's maligning me… There's really no easy way to specify in the macro name whether you want the link text to disappear or become normal… Ink's use of [square brackets] to specify removed text among the link text has been taunting me for a while…
Sneak peek of the language designer (me) at work
…………………………………………
The videogame whimsical daydream of the 10's was running around an urban area with a portal gun. The videogame whimsical daydream of the 20's is running around a museum with the Obra Dinn stopwatch.
The final boss of the game Anodyne 1… is very, very bad. "Oh, so it's hard?" No, not really. It is, however, very, very bad.
KEY ITEMS • Dusk Fortress B1F Key • House Key • Deathcliff Keep 12F Key • Suspiciously Locked Pantry Key • Detached Iron Gate In The Middle Of The Wilderness Key • Locked Treasure Chest Key • Locked Mimic Key • Dusk Fortress B1F Key (Real)
This game (Anodyne 1)'s dungeons are really just has the key maze and little else, and it feels like there's barely anything left to gain over just making the dungeon strictly linear, doing away with the keys and map and just having the rooms, like an action game.
Dungeons in Zelda 1 and 2 were combat-heavy mazes of attrition, but by LA, the combat angle had faded, leaving just mazes of keys and single-room puzzles, and MAYBE had some showy setpiece room or machine that opened and closed paths.
I want to like the game's barebones Zelda dungeons, which give no new equipment items and use only mechanics that the player's weapon and jump verbs can manipulate… but I feel like these instead illustrate how much of the "Zelda dungeon" formula was just key-collecting busywork.
When I say "audiovisual ideas" from Yume Nikki, I mean stuff like one area having 3-colour graphics, and another area's music track sounding like this: https://htch.bandcamp.com/track/space
God, the Link's Awakening parts and the Yume Nikki parts of this undermine each other so much. LA's strength is its humanity, and YN's strength is alienation. And what's worse is they're so on the nose, often whole sentences from the former and audiovisual ideas from the latter.
I'm playing Anodyne 1, and I didn't really get what kind of Yume Nikki influence the store page was talking about, but now, with utter face-drooping weariness, I regret to announce that I've found it.
The true purpose of metre rulers in primary school (1m wood rulers stored near the blackboard) is to serve as a visual aide to silently help students internalise the length of 1 metre. Its intended purpose (to rule lines in chalk on blackboards) is vastly inferior in importance.
Soulslike game with unidentified coloured potions and scrolls, and whenever you die you lose the identification and the colours are re-randomised. I'm releasing this genius idea to the winds because I know it'll never happen.
Bumping this to make the observation that the MTG company has recently announced a limited-time product that contains 5 of these cards and no other cards, with a retail price of "a bit more than" $165. No, I won't link it.
"Is Dark Souls a zombie apocalypse" indiscriminately vapourised from social media servers within 50ms of the post being written to disk
Wait… hang on. It's the dog name, isn't it? Damn, I picked the wrong dog name option. Knew I should've gone with "no name". Well ain't that just all.
OK, fine, I give up. I can't riddle this out. How do you save Curly Brace in Kentucky Route Zero. *everyone looks baffled and horrified by this until they figure out, somehow, that I'm talking about unlocking the final chapter select option*
In this game, it's surprisingly great at enticing you to give one last try (which, like in NetHack, works great with the difficulty) but I feel it's undermined by, yes, the ability to grind for currency. (This is why Shovel Knight's main campaign doesn't let you revisit levels.)
My opinion of the Demon's/Dark Souls "retrieve" mechanic: It feels like a very natural evolution of the ancient RPG "lose half your gold on death" punishment from Dragon Quest 1 (1986), that also has the eerieness of NetHack's bones files (at least as early as Hack 1.0, 1984)
Can't believe they made this textbook sphinx and didn't put in any of the cat parts. Shaking my head. Swinging my face. Wobbling my noggin. Convulsing my cranium. Centrifuging my
Well, I've finished the game. Time to go and visit all those optional places I missed out o– *the credits finish, revealing my save file has been automatically erased and replaced with New Game Plus* NEVER FREAKENING MIND!!!!!!!!!
"The somnoweb, the great narco-psychic cyberspace, uses a language called TimsFunkyScript, invented by Tim Cornacre in early 2000. Fifty years later, all human minds have TimsFunkyScript interpreters neuroprinted within. It is what makes us human, our mind's opposable thumb."
"Humans inhale about 80,000 litres of air a day. Unlike most humans, we get ours all done early each morning in the Inflation Chambers, so we can enjoy our open-vacuum luxury cruise air-free! Gaze on the wonders of space, with literally nothing in between."
Playing Dark Souls has finally made me appreciate the true challenge of Dark Souls…… trying not to lose your damn mind while spending two solid minutes trucking from the save point to a boss battle that you lose in 20 seconds!!
Why did they have to specify that the evil white dragon is an albino?? Why is this trope still in existence?!
Second funniest part of this game is when you toss a prism stone off a lethal fall distance and its impact sounds like a heavily bitcrushed stock sound effect scream.
*finishing chalking up diagrams on a whiteboard* It's very simple. Sen's Fortress is Victory Road, Anor Londo is Pokémon League, the Lord Soul rotters are the Elite Four… Ornstein and Smough are, uh, um, Jessie and James from Pokémon Yellow,
I'll just state the obvious. I'll just state it. "YOU DIED" is so much better than "GAME OVER" on basically every metric, it's not even funny, and it's incredibly fortunate this game happened to partially break up the latter phrase's stranglehold on the form.
It's well known that "fictional lamps in videogames use real electricity" but they also use imaginary electricity. We can express the wattage of a videogame lamp as a complex number of the form a+bi *you decide to stop reading here as no punch-line could possibly be worth this*
Like, to contrast with Wind Waker specifically, its quest NPCs fit in neatly with its light, fluid tone and art style, whereas Dark Souls's NPCs feel more out-of-place and mysterious as a result.
Thinking of how this has the same kinds of strange/silly main quest NPCs as a typical Zelda (talking sea monster, towering goddess, giant bird, etc) but these feel more special/subversive… I think because the harsh, less grandiose art/music direction sharply contrasts with them.
This game's got a lot of RPG inventory cruft, but I'm glad the flask is more or less the be-all end-all solution for healing. I'm imagining how awful this game would be if you had four or five different levels of "potion" you had to find that took up a slot each, like usual.
The wide variety of boss concepts – ranging from swordfights to more Zelda-like puzzle affairs – is rather nice, even if many of them are veeeeeeery swingy in an unpleasant way. Not even just in favour of the bosses either, with several having awkward safe spots in their attacks.
Thinking about Anor Londo, and how the "mega-city" made entirely of the grandest architecture the setting can allow, enlarged to skyscrapers, is kind of a high sf cliché, such as in MTG's Ravnica (2005) – modern notions of a "city" fitted, via magic or divinity, into the past.
This game (Dark Souls) is NOT very polite at all to Heights Dislikers
Why do Dark Souls rats randomly drop Humanity? Hmm… Makes u think… –– For more gam3r tw1337s, hit the follow button! Here's a "5 minute demo" of what you're missing: –– Time to spend skill points *opens the list to find a 75%-off flash sale on something called "Stength"* Uh oh
It turned out that the part I thought was the end wasn't the end, and now I'm upset because this means I really, really didn't budget enough weeks to play this and the other two games in.
One of MTG's bigger disappointments is when you out that "summoning sickness" isn't something cool like NetHack's "teleportitis", but is instead just the fantasy equivalent of jet lag.
I'll admit, I'd thought the area made of roughly-hewn wood bridges and shacks populated by unhygienic humanoids was a little on the nose, but the addition of poison dart blowers is definitely a bit much.
I suspect this sort of excellent pacing trick is one of the reasons people resonate with Undertale's "Despite everything, it's still you", which is a message you see while visiting the second of two parents' homes, each at the (neutral) game's 20% and 80% marks.
Something I actually really like is that the main quest has only two McGuffins (the Bells) to obtain before the endgame, and you obtain them at the game's 20% and 80% marks. A long chasm of time and space between them, that makes the second so much more meaningful than the first.
I can't believe this game (Dark Souls) pulls the same "sacred obstacle course dungeon to test the Chosen One" trope that every game since Zelda II did. It's not good writing!! It's the "a wizard did it" of worldbuilding!!! Wind Waker did it! BotW did it 120 times! 137 with DLC!
THERE'S A SHOP YOU CAN SELL ITEMS AND EQUIPMENT TO??? God, this is terrible. Someone please save these pristine games from terrible AAA RPG grinding mechanics.
So, like, are all those poor people who did Overwatch fanart nonstop for three years going to get compensation from Blizzard for them tanking the lore, or what
OBSERVATIONAL HUMOUR AHEAD See tutorial? >y Observational humour tweets present gentle absurdities of life. They have low Necessity, Urgency and Context, medium Sincerity, and high Relatability. Begin encounter? >y –TWEET BEGINS– *sees green banana with spots* MAKE UP YOUR MIND
Decided to read a few forum posts in archived Dark Souls prerelease threads (source: http://forums.selectbutton.net/viewtopic.php?p=1015945#1015945)
I just want to say that 3D level designers have to do some twisted and messed up things to architecture in order to make levels where out-of-bounds areas are signified with obviously lethal fall distance, and I won't pretend not to notice.
Easily the funniest thing in this game so far is seeing enemies whip out and quaff their own healing potions right in the middle of combat, an animation that observes and redeems the inherent dissonant silliness of RPG player-characters mashing heals every two actions.
To me the biggest feature of Metroidvania world structure is how there is initially an obvious hierarchy to the areas – "level 1", "level 2" – but as the game advances, that hierarchy is fogged, with new areas that fit nowhere, as well as earlier areas taking on new roles.
I suspect the zeitgeist is reticent to call Dark Souls a Metroidvania because the major items aren't "powerups" (except the ones that are) and there are no missile tanks – but the world has the same tight-knit weblike structure that marks it as neither open-world nor level-based.
Its other admirable commitment to versimilitude is the much-vaunted Super Metroid-esque lengths it goes in map topology to avoid needing a fast travel mechanic. Though, the real genius move is also offering no in-game map whatsoever, thus making it all seem especially impressive.
I appreciate Dark Souls's commitment to versimilitude by implying that every enemy that respawns is undead, and when you go to rest, they just get back up after you've killed them… even though it breaks that rule several hundred times later on.
I'm playing the Dark Souls series for the absolute first time ever right now, and I regret to say I'm already bitterly disappointed. Level ups?! What is this grindy trash
Quick poll: what's the name of the videogame scrolling mechanic where the camera scrolls an entire screen's length at a time whenever the player crosses a screen boundary? (This is a trick question. It has no name, despite being omnipresent in games since antiquity.)
"Last we saw the control flow, it had called extern_api_fn()… and it just… never came back. We pray it's still out there, in the Externals, executing instructions the likes we can't imagine, and that on some cycle it will finally return home."
"Without the Magic Number in your first 8 bytes, you're just an ordinary file, but with it… oh my, every program on the Great Platters will open for you! Well, I of course possess the Number, and just for you, my dear, I might disrobe and reveal it… for one favour… per byte."
Luxury retirement asteroid with an entire Earthlike atmosphere held on using glue and wire
Zombie rats are always portrayed as behaving like normal rats, indifferent to their undeath. Simultaneously mocking and admiring the rat's human-perceived uncleanliness, tenacity and pragmatism.
Upgrading your spaceship's dexterity
Meanwhile, in Mario Maker levels,
LEON PRODUCTIONS PRESENTS THE OFFICIAL "NUTCRACKER SUITE" TIER LIST S: Waltz of the Flowers A: Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy B: March, Chinese Dance, Dance of the Reed Flutes C: Trepak D: Arabian Dance BANNED TO SMOGON UBERS, SOMEHOW: Overture
Time for a joke. Why are the Super Mario outdoors themes called "Athletic"? Because they're the music Track in Fields! – 5,612 comments: VarCharMander (12 LeonKred) DON'T END THE TWEET BEFORE MY COMMENT FINISHES!!! But the Athletic themes actually played in the sk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YYFNYInT1mk&feature=youtu.be&t=405 – I just lost my mind at the section of 6:45 to 7:25.
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