Leon's Microblog – December 2022

Thrilled to learn that MAME lets you set an arbitrary and rough "resolution" for all of your games, and as long as keepaspect is true and unevenstretch is false, it will find the nearest integer scale for the game that can fit in the dimensions. 💋Mwah!

*"as long as Reimu has someone to fight, she'll live a long life" voice* As long as Leon has old videogames that everyone already enjoyed and constantly recommended over a decade ago to unexpectedly discover, he'll live a long life…

Land Maker (arcade game) is "what if Sburb (from Homestuck) was a real videogame and it existed 11 years earlier"

I've just spent the past two days finally finding out about Land Maker (vs. puzzle arcade game) and I completely understand the hype. It feels like it belongs alongside Osman in the sense that it takes a normal arcade genre and delivers it with confidence and imagination.

Knowing that Wario's Woods's most immediate design predecessor is Dr. Mario is understandable, but still so baffling when you glance at both games.

Incredible default arcade game high score list

I'm with the fish from the "It's been one of those weeks... pass the yaoi" meme, but I accidentally pass Moto Hagio's Heart Of Thomas, bumming them out even more

Those of you who don't dabble in fiction may wonder how people can continue making OCs with the knowledge that the perfect character has already been designed (Devilotte from Cyberbots). The answer is that we all must find our own reasons to pick ourselves up and soldier on.

https://horaro.org/rtaij/rtaijw2022 – ⚠ Epic run spotted on RTA in Japan's schedule ⚠

Watching competitive Wario's Woods

Stereogram FAQ Q: I can't see the 3D image A: Skill issue

The Smash Bros. Ultimate parry move (inputted by /releasing/ shield on the same frame as an incoming attack) is called the "just shield" in Japanese as a reference to Haskell: you either have Just shield, or, if you do it too early, Nothing 0 views, somehow

When I think about Christmas and family, I think about this comic, which isn't even set on Christmas https://twitter.com/webbedspace/status/1245934922193186817

I'm glad that one of the heavily emphasised selling points of the Dodonpachi Daioujou modern port is "SUPER EASY MODE"

Is Connect Four a falling block puzzle game

Reimu 🤝 Strong Bad Four feet tall and canonically drinks

Dwarf Fortress's graphics are… they look very "TIGSource 2011", which I guess is exactly era-appropriate for the game.

Don't even *think* of doing this.

#RoadToGrandmaster I can somewhat reliably beat CPU level 12! Only 3 more to go………

If these so-called "VT100 escape codes" actually worked, I wouldn't still be having to conform software to it

I'm glad Pokémon Scarlet/Violet has reasonable character writing in it… I just remembered how Pokémon X/Y had one of the Elite Four members be a Team Flare executive, and that this never led to anything or ever became relevant.

It's called "breadth" because you only need to use that word when measuring a loaf of bread. –– "As you see, this traditional tweet harkens back to the 92-character era, when typing exactly 92 characters was prized. It lasted for 2 days and was reminisced about for 6 years."

Everyone. This is my newest tweet. Iron Bundle, the Paradox Pokémon with obscenely high stats, looks like something Rena Ryuugu (protagonist of Higurashi When They Cry) would take home from the garbage dump and put in her yard. Thank you.

"The Mouse, also affectionately known as "the Finger Sofa" and "the Soap Bar of the Gods", is the most powerful computing and gaming input device available. With the Mouse in your grip, any battle can be won, any puzzle can be solved, and any world can be wrought."

Dwarf Fortress's official soundtrack reminds me, in a satisfying way, of Noita's soundtrack. Minor-key guitars are truly the sound of Western Gen-X simulationist fantasy CRPG fans' imaginations.

*reads the scrolling log of murders at the end of each game of Umineko* Damn, didn't realise Dwarf Fortress was this sick

Sans 🤝 the Human Awkwardly long whoopee-cushion noise

The Cast of Umineko: Where Are They Now? *cut to footage of some characters you don't recognise because you never played the game arguing that it's possible to make roasted ice cream if you re-freeze the ice cream afterward, because you can't say it wasn't roasted*

*reads halfway into the first sentence of a Wikipedia article* No

Favourite piece from The Nutcracker Suite? Oh, definitely Chinese Tea. No idea how ZUN just belted that one out

*reading the Wikipedia page about the origin of the term "mulligan"* Well, the first attempted explanation is dubious, but I guess I'll allow them to take a second shot at it

Immortal vampire millennials in the year 11000AD are still going to be posting falling dominos memes like "Lowtax bans hentai . ı ׀ | / Cygni-Ω Dyson ring collides with itself" every few years, aren't they

Hades 2 (2023)

Come to Garfield-themed Petal Crash Online lobby in the next 2 hours if you want an ass kicking

Prose narrators LOVE talking about their spines at the exact moment something scary happens

Trance music is great. I just thought to myself "damn, wish this sweet track wasn't so short" about a piece that's 7:13.

I hope the children working on Undertale-likes right now aren't just repeating all the superficial stuff (secret psychological horror route) but also including the deeply human elements that made the original so beloved (battle messages that tell you what the enemy smells like)

If programmers invented mathematics, they'd have added operators called "super-plus" and "super-minus" which is addition and subtraction but with higher precedence than multiplication, "for people who prefer it that way", and then spent three decades trying to remove them.

Quietly imagining if the Mother series really had been milked for another 2-5 games, each of which had its own increasingly predictable riff on Cave Of The Past at the end

"Oh my god… they pulled out a gun from the future…" – Me every time a character in 13 Sentinels pulls out a gun from the future

"Okay, Python, the programming language, let's see your pitch." *Python raises the ball but doesn't throw it* "No, no, no. Let's see what Java can do." *Java throws the ball from their waist* "Hmm… what about Perl?" *Perl steps onto the mound and immediately keels over*

Thinking about it, the big reason I like the final arc of Scarlet/Violet is because it's basically a lite version of Sun/Moon's super-cool Lusamine plot… It's not a rehash, but it has the same bones…

Sorry for reacting to something that everyone else knew a decade ago, but I can't believe you have to turn on something called "Developer Mode" by entering a cheat code in Android settings just so you can make the phone default to "filesystem" when you plug it into a PC.

What no one tells you about 9 o'clock when you first start out is that, even though it feels like you can putter around for an hour, if you DO, it's suddenly 10 o'clock.

Steel drum really is the best instrument for the Super Mario Bros. theme, which is kind of amazing considering how unpopular that instrument is. They got it right on the money in All-Stars, Melee, that secret music in World…

Realising I dislike online games because they're software-as-a-service

Rust Analyzer sounds like an edutainment game for Pentiums

I haven't played this videogame or know much about it, but I find it interesting that it has late-90's character design but contemporary colouring and UI. Like it's a modern remake of itself. https://twitter.com/envelope_dev/status/1599947299693940737

"One could say that the meteor that killed the dinosaurs was the biggest "chain" in puzzle game history."

*"this is the <noun> of all time" voice* This is definitely the brief history of all time

Thinking of how funny and underrated it is that Ness in Smash 64 had an up-B move that was so ridiculously counterintuitive that the only way to figure out how to use it properly was to watch the CPU players use it.

AI prompt writing is just a programming language but with everything good about proglangs removed: clarity of what each keyword does, ability to finely tune details and debug, and, most importantly, the same code giving the same output and thus being worth preserving in itself.

I love looking at a Wikipedia mathematics GIF and thinking "that's so cool" because I realise how it works just by looking at it.

I actually listened to the official lyrics of Pollyanna (the Mother 1 overworld theme) sung by the composer himself, and to my surprise… it's actually… pretty catchy…

What if someone was streaming Pokémon Scarlet/Violet and Iona's green-screen cam popped up in front of the actual human player's green-screen cam instead of vice-versa

*puts the UTF-8 byte-order-marker at the end of the text file instead of the start in order to sow anarchy and provoke dangerous ideas*

The day Twitch dot TV figures out that I, being Australian, watch almost all videos via the "Past Broadcasts" VODs, and starts putting ad reels on VODs, is the day I become very grumpy indeed.

Strong Bad gets the any-and-a-half% record on Staircase Ascender, only to learn preheatedpockets00001, real name Homestar Runner, just beat him by playing on "patch minus one", via jailbreaking his Tandy in a 22-step process, of which soaking it in sports drinks is but the start.

Ralsei telling Kris that if you get hit with an instant-KO status effect, any excess HP you had is converted directly into Amazon gift cards, "So, if your last thought is "I can't think of what to get everyone for Christmas"… Don't worry! Everything will be OK."

To me the "C (the programming language) is an FFI protocol" has the same energy as the "Corn is a platform" Twitter thread, and that's why I love it.

Rust programming tweet

TUNIC 🤝 UNIX Can't find the manpages

BASIC just looks incorrect with syntax highlighting.

There's not enough art of knights hugging their swords. C'mon. They're wearing full armour. It's not dangerous. Half the time the sword is wide enough that they could even pat it on the back.

Y'know, I thought I was being a little presumptuous when I got 32GB of RAM for my personal computer two years ago, but, well…​ Rust Analyzer in VSCode on a reasonable-sized codebase really does take 6GB all by itself…

I get the feeling that Game Freak have being trying a lot more to make their plots more unpredictable, to do things differently from the previous times, and using "red herring characters" in the earlygame and prerelease marketing.

First 20 seconds of the "Super Mario 64 but with Odyssey mechanics" fangame speedrun (start at 3:24) are a lot to take in https://youtu.be/jWVjYx2JLI0?t=204