Leon's Microblog – June 2024

Right now both Netrunner and Magic: The Gathering are running pro tournament streams on their companies' respective Twitch accounts, and it's a real jarring contrast of two different kinds of quality.

It's kind of wild to think about how Netrunner decks only allow 3 of each card name, AND random discard is a major mechanic in almost every matchup, and it still has fewer blowouts than standard MTG.

Searching for secrets in Void Stranger is like

The best thing about competitive Netrunner is that there are no mirror matches… so you can always blame the matchup : )

One big thing about Netrunner that really helps it narratively cohere compared to MTG is how everything is "just" electronics – so for instance, it isn't a logic problem to use your battery-themed card to add power to your werewolf-themed card, because they're both just software.

It's another "Gammis - logfiles of death" day, one of those days where logs.xm is the only music you need https://modarchive.org/index.php?request=view_player&query=48701

１００ｍ🦧 　７５ｍ🦧 　５０ｍ🦧 　２５ｍ🦧 HOW HIGH CAN YOU GET ?

Trivia: • Battler Ushiromiya was originally named that because "battler" is internal terminology for an in-combat game entity in Umineko's game engine (RPG Maker VX)

Rigged Jenga set where all the blocks are exactly the same size and it's impossible to nudge any of them out, thus forcing both players to leave the tower on their coffee table for the rest of their lives

Today I learned the Red Ring of Death wasn't even a full ring? It was only three-quarters of a circle? Even though it was called the Xbox 360?? It was only 270???

Yahaha! That's right! I'm the one rascally person in the whole world who speaks to key NPCs from unusual angles, thus forcing the player-character to slowly walk to the intended position to begin the cutscene! It's all because of me! And I'll never regret a second of it!!

Recommended For You: • Did Undertale Invent Wholesome Games? (600 million billion trillion squillion words, est 4 millennia read) • On the 25th Anniversary of the Term "Ludonarrative Dissonance" (800 words, est 1 hr because some of the words are hard) • Privacy Policy (1250 wo

*suddenly rises from behind your monitor and plonks my crossed arms and manically grinning chin atop it* Using symbol emojis as UI icons in your web app??? Oh ho ho ho!!!!

What? No, I have no opinions on "The Legend of Zelda". I have never cared about that game series OR its in-universe timeline OR its gender politics in my entire life. I don't even like Nintendo games. I'm a Sega fan, and care only for its flagship high-fantasy franchise, "Puyo Pu

Someone mentioned that old favourite roguelike 868-HACK… and before I knew it, the mirror-shades were back on.

Wario Land 1 had so many cloudscape/stratosphere levels and they all looked so good ;_;

Big SMW pet peeve from childhoodean days: You can use the Star Road to advance to later worlds' entrances, but you can't get off and explore that world! The only destination you can exit at is Bowser's Castle! It's like if the Warp Zones only took you to 8-4. Yeesh!

Take a melody, Simple as can be, They are the modern Stone-age family,

*game music playlist randomly hits Rouxls Kaard's theme from chapter 2 of 'Rune* Wow……… I completely forgot how much this track sucks. … *the FF6 Dancing Mad vox kicks in* NEVERMIND 11 OUT OF 10

True if huge

When are we getting a deckbuilding roguelike where the "deck" is actually your older brother's TCG deck that you have stolen while he's at summer camp, intending to play everyone in your neighborhood "for keeps" to win all their holofoils, despite barely understanding the rules

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wZdZKolMIl0 – Listening to the full song that was used in the '78 Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy for the first time… wow, it's like the exact midpoint between Outer Wilds and Noita.

>n There is an invisible wall here, preventing you from traveling to an unimportant area. >push it The invisible wall falls over with an equally invisible thump. >n You trip on the edge of the fallen wall, which then prevents your face from traveling to an unimportant the ground.

If Donkey Kong Country 2 had been made only three or four years later, then there'd definitely have been a trophy for getting the KONG letters in every level, plus a trophy for hitting a prize in every strength-tester level goal, all of which would be needed for a third ending.

The four yugas

It's funny to think about how the "3-and-1" melody of Beethoven's 5th movement 3 is a counterpart to the famous 3-and-1 that opens movement 1… One is How It Started and the other is How It's Going.

In memory of Switch twitter integration, everyone post some of your favourite such tweets from over the years https://x.com/sc8I4LjG6djc26e/status/922405174508785664

I wish there were more standard social media tags for blind playthrough reactions of games. I'd love to see people's Void Stranger posts when they find the onion. *←acting like finding the onion is at all interesting or even remotely close to the high tier of the game's secrets*

If platformers were designed the way card games are designed, you'd see stuff like double-jumps that gain height the more gold you have, or ground-pounds that do x1.5 damage if you did them from a coyote time jump.

Balatro's sound effects are from Freesound dot org. They're CC0. You can just put them in your game. Currently imagining Higurashi with xmult sounds

Every triple-A game is either fantasy or sci-fi… There's only one thing to do… *everyone arounds me realises where I'm going and starts vigorously shaking their head* We have no choice… *they get out of their chairs* We need… *they run to tackle me* …to bring back steampunk–

Secret forbidden indie game trailer tech: just put "dude you spent 30 hours playing The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess in 2006 but you 'don't feel like' trying this???" atop the game footage for 30 seconds

Pulling this one off the shelf to see if I've "still got it"…… Maybe I'm due another hour with the controls, but other than that…

Honestly, AI art solely becoming a symbol of people trying to cloyingly invoke the viewer's received preconceptions, instead of introducing new ideas, is at least convenient in making fully visible a particular discursive intent that until now required even a little concealment.

*thinking very deeply* A dialog box, in a videogame, is a primitive kind of cutscene that can only portray letters appearing sequentially.

OK, that's enough cute frogs in games. We've had fun, but it's time to swing the pendulum back. Now we need the ugliest amphibians that GPUs can conjure - riveted, mottled cane toad skin, rendered with the same affection as ancient dragon heads in AAA fantasy games.

"Swords are actually implemented as gloves that add an extra-long sixth finger while removing the other five."

Excised cutscene of Gray from Void Stranger getting a panel stuck inside the staff, and having to reach shoulder-deep into the dark orb on the end to retrieve it, only for her arm to get jammed, too, then walking back and forth, shaking it and calling "Uhh… li'l help?" to nobody

Budding, inedible joker: "Four Fingers and Shortcut are the primary jokers for Straight builds in Balatro" Ripened, heavy joker: "Juggler and Troubadour are the primary jokers for Straight builds in Balatro"

Website update: I've updated my favourite SIDs playlist at https://fairysvoice.net/playlists/ to include a large handful of recent finds over the past year or two.

You can tune an old piano, but you can't tuna old fish new tricks

Start listening to a SID. It's a remix of a track called "StillPlayingMario.nsf" I search for the NSF original. There is no original.

The Javascript of the 90s': hundreds of function() statements loaded by <script> tag The Javascript of the 20's: hundreds of function() statements but this time they have "export" in front and the <script> tag says "module" instead of "text/javascript"

I love playing the High Voltage SID Collection on shuffle, discovering some interesting mid-2000s chiptune, and then, as soon as it finishes, immediately getting Shave And A Haircut on sawtooth wave

ESLint, in contrast to previous linters, is designed for the sort of programmer who REALLY wants to make putting a space between a function name and the parentheses to be a syntax error, because they "don't like it" – and for that level of self-servingness, it works very well.

Greatest ESLint Options of Some Time

TypeScript declining to add new runtime syntactic features over Javascript EXCEPT THE "enum" KEYWORD is still one of the more baffling design decisions. I mean, if you're going to add what is essentially syntactic sugar, couldn't you at least make if-statement brackets optional

Bad news, everyone. I'm actually the exact use-case that benefits from the ESLint config format change. My project has 3 different kinds of Javascript in it (TypeScript source, in-browser Javascript tests, Node scripts) and having one file that covers all of them works for me.