ryotaiku

[ryotaiku]

Thinking about it, I think my biggest issue with Palworld is despite the controversy surrounding it, the game itself plays it remarkably safe & inoffensive.

Like, the edgiest bits, butchering pals & sweatshop labor, aren't even a significant part of the game. They're just things you can offhandedly do. I don't even think it needs to be edgy, but for a game sold on being everything PETA fantasized about Pokemon, it doesn't really feel like it.

The most creative thing it does is letting the Pals do menial labor for you; gathering resources, farming, crafting, incubating eggs, refrigerating perishables, etc. But everything surrounding that mechanic is just... open-world survival crafting, and you can get that anywhere these days. In much more interesting forms.

Even the pals aren't that special. They're only really useful for the base management, as well as open world traversal, but in actual combat, the thing Pokemon are most well-known for, they suck absolute ass. They can help a little but you're still expected to do all the fighting. It's basically just Genshin Impact with summons.

I have friends who think Palworld is a disgrace to the industry, but all I feel is pity. A mish-mash of mechanics that are technically functional, but don't really complement each other and just kind of exist.

Palworld is what it means to have a game with no soul.

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Frustrated by the lack of OG FFVII wallpapers, I made my own

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Bless competitive multiplayer games that let you disable chat

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Remember kids, the purpose of an emulator is not to port console exclusives to PC. It's to emulate the console hardware. Emu devs are gonna showcase multiplatform titles in their progress updates and it's important to remember the game being shown isn't the point of what they're showing off.

Nooo why are you emulating GTA V you can play that on PC

It's not the fuckin point!

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Harry Potter: It's better for house elves to be slaves and they like it actually

The Magicians: Fairies trick people into giving up their firstborns and commit colonialism in fantasy worlds but even they don't deserve slavery

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Maid RPG looks like a really fun system but I no longer have a friend group who'd be willing to play it. I have no maids and I must clean.

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I've been watching The Magicians as a potential replacement for Harry Potter and it just occurred to me this show is about a hyper-fan of children's fantasy books who finds out the author of said-books is an awful human being threatening the life of the people he knows & loves.

I wasn't even looking for that in particular but holy shit this is perfect.

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A useless explanation of reversible covers

A reversible cover is any physical game in which the internal box art (what you see behind the disc) can be reversed & used as a whole alternative game cover. However there's a distinction between a reversible cover and internal box art. It lies in two places:

The game title

A visible spine

The latter is especially crucial because who in their right mind would display a game on their shelf when you can't even see what game it is? Here are some examples.

Exhibit A: The Last of Us Remastered

No game title

No spine

This is not a reversible cover.

Special shout-out to my copy of Uncharted 3, which is a Greatest Hits Edition, and has internal box art... but Greatest Hits cases on PS3 are opaque.

Exhibit B: Bloodborne

Game title is present, but it'd be on the back of the case. This is fine, my Persona 5 Royal steelbook displays the same way. But the real flaw here is there's no spine. Not a reversible cover.

Exhibit C: Marvel's Spider-Man

No title on the cover, but we do have a spine. But considering the cover is Spider-Man, I'm willing to say a title is not needed. This counts as a reversible cover. My only criticism is the Spider-Man logo should be on the front while the Spider-Man figure should go on the back.

Exhibit D: Final Fantasy XII: The Zodiac Age

Here's what we're really lookin for. Title on the cover, the front side of the cover no less, but most importantly we also have a spine. This is a tried & true reversible cover right here. Though admittedly I don't actually like this cover so I've opted not to reverse it. Final Fantasy's gotta have that title on white background on the front or it's just not the same. Stares at the XV & VII Remake covers that use black backgrounds

Appendix: System information

While the title on the cover & spine are the essentials, sometimes reversible covers will still include system information in their covers.

Some examples include:

NieR Automata's reversible cover keeping the PS4 band while leaving out the system info on the back

Dragon Quest XI's reversed cover has a completely different game sell on the back than what you'd see on store shelves

and Stranger of Paradise with its sick-ass reversible cover ruined with an obnoxious health & safety warning already present on the unreversed cover.

What's your favorite reversible cover? Lemme know, but make damn sure it's actually a reversible cover.

[ryotaiku]

The instinctual need to gather the drippy honey whenever I see it

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I tried to record my Omnislash but I forgot I had Counter equipped

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I could never be under Azula's command because if she asked me if the tides commanded her ship I'd say "kinda, yeah" and she'd throw me overboard so the tides could prove me right.

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Something weird about my aspect ratio preferences: If I'm playing a game through an analog output like S-video or composite, I can tolerate and arguably prefer widescreen stretching. But if I'm using an HDMI signal, I gotta 4:3 that shit. I think it's because analog stretching is slightly letterboxed.

[ryotaiku]

Somehow it slipped past me but I gave Watchmen Chapter 1 a watch(men).

This is the third (yes, third) adaptation of Watchmen the graphic novel. First was the Watchmen Motion Comic, which is the most faithful you can get without just reading it. It was pretty good, a lot more animated than you think it'd be, though it could've really benefited from hiring a woman to voice the female characters. The voices are all done by one dude and his attempt at voicing women wasn't great.

One year later came Zack Snyder's Watchmen, which seems to have had a bell curve in critical reception. First people hated it, then people loved it, now people hate it again. I haven't seen it in a while, but if I were to watch it again I'd probably say it was fine. Not the most faithful, and if it was the only adaptation I'd say it was okay. In fact for a long time I thought this was the only adaptation until I discovered the motion comic, and even then I thought this one came first.

Now we have Watchmen Chapter 1, the first part of an all new adaptation.

Gonna talk spoilers. Be sure to read the comic or be familiar with the story before reading onward. Seriously go read the comic if you haven't it's really good.

Watchmen Chapter 1 covers everything up to Rorschach getting arrested. This implies to me it'll be a two-parter, but I could've seen it ending earlier & making it a three-parter. Watchmen has a lot going on, and it's hard to fit it all into two movies. The motion comic is almost six hours long, and that covered everything page-by-page. Almost.

Something that makes Watchmen hard to adapt is it's literally half-graphic and half novel. Every chapter ends with a few pages of pure literature with no illustration at all, ranging from journal excerpts to newspaper clippings to police reports. Zack Snyder's adaptation weaved Rorschach's journal into scenes with no narration in the comic, and Watchmen Chapter 1 does the same; though it's cut down a lot more.

My favorite thing this adaptation does is it includes the pirate comic (notably absent in the initial Snyder adaptation), but it makes the decision to not animate it. The pages are shown and the narration is read, but none of it moves like the characters. It's a comic within the comic, and the adaptation keeps it a comic. Not only that, but the the pirate comic is narrated directly in line with how it parallels the story; something I never even put together the first time I read it. I like that a lot.

My only complaint is I think it's a little too obvious that Rorschach is the doomsday activist. I remember him being kind of a background character, not someone you'd immediately notice, and Snyder did the same thing. It's a detail you're meant to notice on a second or third reading. But this adaptation almost makes it a point to focus on him, like they don't want you to forget he's there, so you'll recognize him when the police tear his mask off. I dunno how I feel about that, and I'm not even sure if I remember the comic right. I'll have to read it again to reconfirm my memory.

Overall though Watchmen Chapter 1 is pretty solid. I dunno if Watchmen really needed another adaptation, but if you're gonna watch & criticize a remake, you have to accept the fact that the remake exists. And as it exists, I liked it.

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As a kid I thought my favorite retro store would be a place full of PS2 games & Freeplay arcade cabinets but nowadays my favorite retro store mostly sells music and stinks of incense and is run by a guy who uses the store's social media to promote his Kiss cover band.

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Tales of Phantasia is a 2D SNES game and it has reflection graphics that put Nvidia to shame.