prokopetz

[prokopetz]

Conveying the unmistakable impression that the writers assume any player who actually chooses to exercise that option is doing so as a joke.

It's wild to me that full-featured character customisation has been paraded about for decades in AAA spaces as the true litmus test of whether a game takes open-world play seriously and a lot of them still treat playing as a woman the same way Baldur's Gate treats playing as a gnome.

[prokopetz]

It's wild to me that full-featured character customisation has been paraded about for decades in AAA spaces as the true litmus test of whether a game takes open-world play seriously and a lot of them still treat playing as a woman the same way Baldur's Gate treats playing as a gnome.

[prokopetz]

Technically every post you've ever written that no-one else got to see because the platform shat itself when you clicked "post" is lost media.

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Hey, so the penguin king link isn’t working for Gone to Hell so I was wondering if there was anywhere else one could access its files?

You probably found an old reblog of my pinned post. Check the current version – all the links should be up to date.

[prokopetz]

When you see a dual-knob setup like that it's usually intended for Pong clones, so strictly speaking the third gender is tennis.

Whenever the history of video game consoles comes up on this blog, folks tend to be surprised by remarks like describing the PS2 as "sixth generation" – like, if the PS2 was already six generations deep, what the fuck did the other five look like? The idea that home video game consoles have been around since the early 1970s is unexpected to many, and I 100% encourage anybody with an interest in the medium to read up on those early consoles, not only because knowing your history is handy, but because they were often pretty fantastic aesthetically. Like, look at this thing:

This is a Magnavox Odyssey from 1972. I love the juxtaposition of sterile white plastic, faux leather texture, and artificial wood grain – it's like it can't decide whether it wants to be a Star Trek prop or a footrest. However, I personally regard 1977's Coleco Telstar Arcade as the pinnacle of the form, because... well:

Like, this is it, folks. This is what peak performance looks like.

[prokopetz]

Yeah, the NES wasn't even the first home video game console made by Nintendo; that honour goes to 1977's Color TV-Game 6:

Whenever the history of video game consoles comes up on this blog, folks tend to be surprised by remarks like describing the PS2 as "sixth generation" – like, if the PS2 was already six generations deep, what the fuck did the other five look like? The idea that home video game consoles have been around since the early 1970s is unexpected to many, and I 100% encourage anybody with an interest in the medium to read up on those early consoles, not only because knowing your history is handy, but because they were often pretty fantastic aesthetically. Like, look at this thing:

This is a Magnavox Odyssey from 1972. I love the juxtaposition of sterile white plastic, faux leather texture, and artificial wood grain – it's like it can't decide whether it wants to be a Star Trek prop or a footrest. However, I personally regard 1977's Coleco Telstar Arcade as the pinnacle of the form, because... well:

Like, this is it, folks. This is what peak performance looks like.

[prokopetz]

Whenever the history of video game consoles comes up on this blog, folks tend to be surprised by remarks like describing the PS2 as "sixth generation" – like, if the PS2 was already six generations deep, what the fuck did the other five look like? The idea that home video game consoles have been around since the early 1970s is unexpected to many, and I 100% encourage anybody with an interest in the medium to read up on those early consoles, not only because knowing your history is handy, but because they were often pretty fantastic aesthetically. Like, look at this thing:

This is a Magnavox Odyssey from 1972. I love the juxtaposition of sterile white plastic, faux leather texture, and artificial wood grain – it's like it can't decide whether it wants to be a Star Trek prop or a footrest. However, I personally regard 1977's Coleco Telstar Arcade as the pinnacle of the form, because... well:

Like, this is it, folks. This is what peak performance looks like.

[prokopetz]

i recall at one point hearing about a system(possibly an older white wolf one, but i'm not sure) where, due to the way botches were calculated, increasing your stats for at least some rolls also had a slight mathematical increase in your chances of getting a botched roll. do you happen to remember anything like what i'm describing, by chance? i'm not really well-versed enough in dice statistics to be able to look through games and tell which ones would work out that way, unfortunately

Classic World of Darkness systems use hit-counting dice pools with variable target numbers (i.e., you roll a bunch of d10s and count how many are equal to or greater than a given number), but also have 1s subtract hits, so it's possible to roll zero or fewer hits; for example, if you're rolling five dice against a target number of 7 and get 1, 1, 3, 5, 8, that's technically negative one hits, since you get one hit for the 8, but subtract two for the 1s.

The wrinkle lies in how a botch is defined. In the system's modern iterations, you need to score zero hits (i.e., no dice showing higher than the target number) and at least one 1 in order to botch; as originally designed, however, any roll with negative hits was a botch. This creates two distinct mathematical quirks:

Using the modern definition of a botch, the absolute likelihood of a botch trends strictly downward as the number of dice increases, since the odds of rolling no hits at all become increasingly remote; however, the portion of your failures that botch rises with the number of dice, as – given that all of your dice missed – more dice means a greater likelihood that at least one of those misses is a 1. This isn't impossible to account for narratively – the idea that highly skilled characters tend to biff it big on the rare occasions that they fail makes some sense – but some players find it unaesthetic.

Using the old-school definition of a botch (i.e., any roll with negative hits botches, not just rolls that had zero hits before subtracting 1s), only when your target number is higher than 6 increasing the size of your dice pool legitimately can increase the absolute likelihood of a botch. It does fall off again as dice pools become very large, and the likelihood of a botch never rises faster than the likelihood of success, but it does create objectively goofy situations like the absolute likelihood of a botch versus target number 9 starting at 10% for a single die, peaking at 17% for four dice, and not going back below 10% until ten dice. A lot of sources recommend just not letting your target numbers go higher than 8 for this reason.

[prokopetz]

Do you know if there's any good (or heck, i'll take a bad one if it's entertainingly so) pretentious bullshit games that were released for the 4th generation of consoles? excluding earthbound because everybody already knows about it.

Since you're citing EarthBound, I'm assuming you mean "pretentious" specifically in the meta bullshit way, which doesn't give us a lot to go on. Games that go in for deep meta bullshit absolutely existed for fourth generation consoles – EarthBound is a very mild example of the type! – but practically none of them were ever localised in English; publishers didn't really figure out there was a Western market for that sort of thing until the fifth gen rolled around. Quintet's "Soul" trilogy might qualify, depending on your criteria? (i.e., Soul Blazer, Illusion of Gaia, and Terranigma, the last of which was never released in North America, but did have an English localisation which was inexplicably only published in Germany and France.) Beyond that, you're entering the realm of fan-translated romhacks, which isn't really my area – I'll have to defer to anyone in the notes who's willing to take up the question.

[prokopetz]

Writing erotic fanfic is uniquely capable of fucking with your self-image, but not in any of the ways folks like to claim it is. "But what if you discover you have a really weird kink" like, yeah, writing porn can do that for you, but so can a TV commercial. Only authorship can give you the experience of trying to write dialogue that sounds like a mediocre porn movie on purpose and discovering that you're bad at it.

[prokopetz]

A lot of my favourite media isn't morally bankrupt so much as it is morally incomprehensible. It studiously adheres to the forms of media that has a moral message it wants to convey, but exactly what that message is, or to whom and under what circumstances it could conceivably apply? Now there's the trick.

[prokopetz]

A lot of my favourite media isn't morally bankrupt so much as it is morally incomprehensible. It studiously adheres to the forms of media that has a moral message it wants to convey, but exactly what that message is, or to whom and under what circumstances it could conceivably apply? Now there's the trick.

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I love it when robotic or cybernetic characters' facial features are greebled in ways that make no earthly sense for that particular organ. Bro, why do you have blinking lights on your ears? Are you legally an airplane?

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Fanart usually depicts Samus Aran's morph ball form as being about the size of a throw pillow, but canonically it's like three feet in diameter, and honestly I'd like to see that acknowledged more. Walk into the room and there's just this fucking Orb.

[prokopetz]

Fanart usually depicts Samus Aran's morph ball form as being about the size of a throw pillow, but canonically it's like three feet in diameter, and honestly I'd like to see that acknowledged more. Walk into the room and there's just this fucking Orb.

[prokopetz]

I love it when robotic or cybernetic characters' facial features are greebled in ways that make no earthly sense for that particular organ. Bro, why do you have blinking lights on your ears? Are you legally an airplane?

[prokopetz]

There's something oddly familiar about this post, but for the life of me I can't put my finger on what.