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alwaysahiccupandastrid · 1 year ago

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Some things I’ve noticed on my second viewing of “Five Nights at Freddy’s” (2023)

(Some of these are obvious, don’t @ me, I’m autistic and I had work the day I first watched the film so my brain was all over the place)

Once again, SPOILERS ARE UNDER THE CUT, PLEASE DONT READ IF YOU ARE AVOIDING SPOILERS!!!!

On my first viewing I thought that showing the security guard at the very start loosening the bolts of the chair straps was a fake out to make us believe he’d escape, but actually he loosened the bolts which is how Mike was able to escape later on

Just want to say that the opening credits are fucking cool and I love them so much

In my previous post about things in the FNAF movie, I incorrectly said there was no Golden Freddy - Golden Freddy is in fact in the film, he’s the one who goes to the house/kills Aunt Jane/is in the taxi

Following on from the above point, I said last time that I thought the cupcake was the fifth ghost child but I actually think it’s Golden Freddy to be honest - the blonde girl was obviously Chica, the boy with the bunny ears was Bonnie, the ginger boy was Foxy, and then there was the blonde boy and another boy with a top hat on. I originally thought that the blonde boy who wore the brown shirt was Freddy because he seemed like the leader, but now I’m wondering if the boy with the top hat was Freddy and the leader boy was in fact Golden Freddy (given his blonde hair)? I’m interested to hear what everyone else thinks

This is obvious but the doctor foreshadowed the ending because she told Mike that drawings are powerful tools for children to express things and understand things, and that’s exactly how Abby communicated to the gang at the end that Afton was responsible for their deaths

^side note but as an early years practitioner at a nursery/for preschool children, it’s actually true that pictures are used to help children learn things even before they can read, write or talk. I don’t know, it just interested me to be like “oh yeah that’s true!!”

There was not that much focus on Mike’s dad, like he was seen so briefly compared to his mom, which makes me wonder if there’s something to it that might be revealed in a future film. Like maybe his “dad” isn’t his dad or something? Because in the game canon, William is his father, so… I don’t know. I also saw someone else point out that in the training video Mike watched, there was a man working on the animatronics who maybe looked like the actor playing Mike’s dad, so maybe his dad worked there with the animatronics?

The film appears to be set in 2000; I’m 90% sure the security cam of Mike in the careers office showed the date as being in 2000, but if someone else can clarify or confirm the exact date then that would be great. It would make sense though because Garret presumably went missing around the same time as the ghost kids (in the 80s), so the film being set in the present day (meaning Mike would be in his 50s) would make zero sense. Also the mobile phones/computers all seem like they come from the early 2000s

Someone on Twitter pointed out that one of Abby’s drawings on her wall appeared to be a red airplane, which could just be an indication/foreshadowing of her knowledge of Garret’s disappearance (his toy airplane) but also someone else said it could have been 9/11 which….?!?! If this film is set in 2000, then that’s FUCKED

(I think it’s either a random drawing or to do with Garret’s toy tbh but the idea of her having foresight of 9/11 is fucking horrifying)

I’m still not totally sure which animatronic the gang were going to force Abby into, like it’s one with spring locks and at first I thought it might be Circus Baby but it doesn’t really look like her. It looks almost like a marionette or something? And I mean, yeah, it could be that they changed the design a bit but they literally stayed faithful to the designs of all the animatronics in the series so… you know.

Desperate to know if Matthew Lillard is aware of the fact that his DILF status has been multiplied by one hundred after this film like can someone check in on him and see if he’s alright? 💀 the FNAF girlies fans are frankly RABID about Afton

On that note, I wonder if Josh Hutcherson or Matthew Lillard have ever played any FNAF games, like were they fans before being cast or…? I really wish we could have content of them talking about the film or promoting it, but Hollywood refuses to pay their actors fairly so 🤷‍♀️

Listen, I ADORE both Josh and Matthew anyway but in this film I feel like Matthew especially stood out??? Maybe it’s just the character he’s playing but he ATE this role up (so did Josh but still)

I feel like the springlock scene was actually more terrifying upon a second viewing like at my first one I was like “that’s not as bad as I imagined” but this time I was like “holy shit he’s in agony” like his screams were PAINFUL to listen to

Speaking of painful to listen to, Freddy gave this really guttural and pained roar/scream at one point during the ending and it really made my heart hurt, it’s like the child inside of him was reliving the memory of their murder or something??? I can’t describe it but it was such an intense moment

I honest to god feel like I enjoyed it more on a second viewing and I don’t know why??? Maybe it’s just because the other people in my cinema weren’t laughing every five minutes but still.

I now have the urge to rewatch ALL of Markiplier’s playthroughs of ALL the FNAF games so… yep!

Once again begging for people to talk about FNAF because I’m not the most knowledgable on the series but I do enjoy it!

#fnaf #five nights at freddy’s #fnaf movie #fnaf movie spoilers #freddy fazbear #bonnie the bunny #chica the chicken #foxy the fox #springtrap #mike schmidt #abby schmidt #william afton #matthew lillard #josh hutcherson

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katapotato55 · 2 years ago

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How to write good horror.

1- DON'T EXPLAIN WHAT THE HORROR IS. DON'T EXPLAIN ANYTHING. no context = more scary. "oh but it is just a ghost- " YES. you know that, I know that, but things are way more scary if you don't explain it. let your audience scare themselves trying to figure it out! the first FNAF game didn't explain anything it was just "ok these machines are kind aggro". that is part of what made it popular! (And truthfully this reason is why i dislike the other games in the series) i can't name how many horror movies i immediately lost interest in because it was explained. "oh no! there is blood dripping from the walls! " its demons or ghosts or whatever. you explained it. it isn't scary now that you explained the joke. if you have to explain what it is, explain it at the END of the story or near the climax at best. (or better yet, don't explain at all) 2- restraint is key i know it is tempting to show organs and blood dripping from the walls and someone eating out a corpse or whatever but don't outright show that kind of stuff ALL THE TIME or else your audience becomes desensitized to it, and if horror fans are reading/watching your work, chances are they are going to think this is weaksauce. you need to be SUBTLE when building up suspense in your story. don't show the real scary bits until the end of the buildup/ 3- normalicy and familiarity is key i am going to use bugsnax as an example. bugsnax has no gore and can be considered child friendly, but what made bugsnax scare people is that it has the facaude of a cutesy little game. doki doki lit club has a simmular principle where its like a normal dating sim but you are caught off guard and things feel off. this is a valuable tool. 4- be original and understand why the more popular ones are popular in the first place everyone has done analogue horror. why ? because we are all so used to modern technology that older televisions and tech seem kinda creepy. Blue_channel by gooseworks is one of my favorites. It gets right to the point, and while it DOES explain what the product is, it doesn't go "oooh death and scary!!! oooooooh!" it lets the audience make up their own horrifying reason as to what is happening here. saying "oooooooh look murder your parents ooooh!" isn't scary, and putting a glitchy tv filter over it isn't going to make it more scary. and finally 5- describe the unfamiliar i know i just said familiarity is key but that is only 1/2 of the equation. Everywhere at the end of time depicts the sounds of memory degrading in an alzheimers patients. this is an experience that no one could relate to except for those who are experiencing it (and sadly, those people are either dead or mentally comatose) this is also why lovecraft horror is loved, because we can only imagine so much before the lack of understanding drives you insane. hope this helps, for the love of all that is good, please stop writing bad horror.

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stemmmm · 10 months ago

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Close to a year and four rewrites later, I present to you...

Stem's Thoughts on the Game Design of Harvest Moon on SNES

I’m not going to lie, if you don’t like farming sims, you won’t like this one. At their core, every farming sim (at least in the rpg genre) is nearly identical, and that’s because of this game. In a way, I might dare to say that Harvest Moon for the SNES is the perfect farming sim because it has every one of the usual elements in their most simplified form and it just works straight from the get-go. It works so well in fact, that after this game came out in 1996, four more entries to the series were released before the year 2000.

If you are someone who does like farming sims, I can’t recommend this game enough. It’s simple and to the point, with a fast pace and enough random events and points of intrigue that the game kept me relatively engaged for my whole playthrough.

Also, by nature of this being the first game and therefore hard to cover concisely and by nature of taking so long to write this... it's long as hell! Enjoy! :) <3

I can’t say my appreciation of this game doesn’t come with a few caveats. I’ve intermittently played HM games all my life, starting with the GameBoy port (GB1) all the way to Pioneers of Olive Town, so while I don’t know exactly how the series has evolved, I’ve seen it at some of its earliest and at its latest. My vague childhood memories of GB1 (a game I didn’t own and didn’t play much of) were that it was pretty sparse and bland, so knowing that this original game was allegedly the same thing but with a little more content, I was expecting the bare minimum. I was prepared to never even be able to leave my farm, but the first thing the game did was shuttle me off to the nearby town and blocked the exit until I talked to everyone there.

(Maps of the town, mountain, and farm via The Spriters Resource)

You learn everything you need to know about the game right here at the beginning; Firstly, that this town is small as all hell and has hardly anyone in it aside from the five girls you can marry and their immediate family members. The next thing you’ll learn is that there’s a fence on your farm, and you need to be taking care of that. Of the few repetitive lines of dialogue any given person in town has to share with you on any given day, a fair amount are devoted to reminding you to fix your fence, to make sure it’s in good repair. There was just a big storm so watch out! Remember to check it every day! Are you chopping enough wood? Because you’ll need it for that fence!

I’m being dramatic of course, you aren’t reminded about it that much, though the thin variation of dialogue means it comes up a lot. The emphasis on your fence does exist, and it isn’t for nothing: while it doesn’t matter as much if all you do is grow crops– if you keep animals, the game tells you that the ideal thing to do for yours and the animal’s happiness is to put the animals outside to graze. Animal feed bought from the livestock shop will keep them fed, but it's nothing compared to fresh grass grown on your farm. You can’t even buy animals without a certain amount of grass planted! And sure, you can cut the grass to store for later, but it’s at its best straight out of the ground. However, the way the game is programmed, the animals only eat when the day rolls over, so putting animals outside for the day and taking them in at night isn’t an option, and on top of that, there’s things that come out at night that can hurt your animals. This is where your fence comes in.

The Utility of Fences

At the entrance to your farm is a cluster of buildings: your house, a small lumber shed, a barn, coop, and silo, a tool shed, and an old, dried up well. Just barely surrounding all of these is a little wooden fence that looks more like a row of upright logs than anything else. Despite this farm having presumably been abandoned, the fence is in perfect repair. You’ll quickly discover that the fence as it is won’t work out; there’s hardly space to plant anything within it, and with the well dried up, you’re forced to hop it to get to a water source to fill up your watering can. It’s pretty clear that you’ll need to expand your fence, and it’s easy to do with all of the tree stumps littering the massive field that it’s blocking off.

On top of needing to expand the range of your fence, the individual planks eventually will rot away and leave useless stumps. They show up more frequently after rain or a large storm. The posts don’t rot away completely so they have to be manually removed, but replacing them is as simple as smashing the old post with a hammer or ax and popping a new post in its place. It becomes a very natural part of your daily routine to run a lap around the farm’s perimeter before you go to bed to make sure everything looks safe and secure. It’s a good way to ensure your animals are put away and debris is cleared out, too! It slotted very nicely into my daily schedule until a certain point.

With how much time you have to spend hopping over the logs to get to the rest of the area too large to fence in, you might be tempted to leave one out of place for easier traversal. When night comes, it’s clear why that would be a mistake. Sometimes when you go to bed, you’ll hear your dog barking. It’s a small detail, one that took me a long time to notice because I didn’t always play with the sound on. There are wild dogs that prowl around the wilderness surrounding your farm, and only at night do they dare to come close. Your dog, if left outside, isn't able to do anything other than warn you of their presence if they show up. There’s nothing to notice during the daytime if it happens, unless you happened to leave one of your animals outside. There was one night that I left my chickens outside, having thought my fence was in perfect order and repair. I went to bed and heard the dog barking, followed by a horrible crunch. When I went out in the morning, I saw where my chicken had been before, it had been replaced by a pile of feathers. On the north side of my farm was a rotted fence post I’d failed to fix.

The Reality of Fences

After losing my chicken, a cluster of pixels on my screen it may have been, I didn’t feel comfortable leaving my animals outside. I didn’t want to take a risk again, the sound and sight of feathers was upsetting enough. On a more logical note, the chickens didn’t even lay eggs if left outside so there was no value in it. Cows were a pain to put back inside the barn too, because of some silliness with the game’s collision. As much of a disappointment as it was to not have my animals roam around, it was just easier. At the time, I was focusing on upgrading my house anyways, so I didn’t have time to take care of my animals outside where time would pass when I could use that time gathering wood, and everything I had was being saved up for the house so I didn’t have any extra materials to repair my fence with. My fence was all rotting away. Because it was inconvenient for getting to my crops, I started smashing all the old posts as they went, too. That’s when I noticed something: the wild dog wasn’t coming anymore.

I didn’t pay much attention to it until I was looking up a completely different mechanic and discovered a forum explaining how the fences were broken. Rotted posts attracted the wild dog, they said. It didn’t matter if you had gaps in your fence, or even a fence at all–in fact no fence was the best kind to have because the mere existence of posts that could rot was a liability.

I was hesitant at first to test this concept, after all there wasn’t much I could gain from it. My chickens wouldn’t lay outside, and my cows would be too challenging to get back in if the forecast called for rain. The thing that got me to finally try it was when I was trying to hatch more chickens. My coop felt like a nightmare to navigate due to its current population. I wanted less animals inside that I had to feed, so I threw a couple chicks outside–they weren’t laying yet anyways. Lo and behold, the dog didn’t come. More days passed and more animals were left outside, and it never came. My fence had rotted until there was nothing left at all. No dogs could ever come to my farm again. And I realized that the game’s own insistence on its mechanics was all a lie.

How You’re Told To Play - How The Game Lies

Of course, my animals didn’t stay outside. For a minute it was fun having a crowd of cows milling about while I tended to my crops, but letting them wander free and uninhibited made it impossible to find and milk all of them without any trouble, and there were the rainy days to watch out for. After the novelty wore off, they went back inside and stayed there. The thing is, that didn’t make a single bit of difference in how much they liked me compared to how they were living in the barn. On top of that, they didn’t seem to care whether I was feeding them grass or store-bought food either, though I mostly stuck to the grasses since they were cheaper and easier to get. Nothing about how I was told to care for animals really mattered past feeding them every day, petting it and maybe brushing it, if it was a cow.

It gets worse. The most basic aspect of the game is the fact that time passes. The story takes place over 2 and a half years, running through each day until the end, and these days last from 6AM to 6PM according to the game’s own internal time setting. After 6PM, all of the shops aside from the bar will close and you lose the ability to sell anything as you’re told it would rot in the shipping bin overnight, so there’s nothing to do but sleep until the next day. Issue with this is that when the days stop at 6PM… they just stop. Time doesn’t flow anymore. The game doesn’t give you any kind of clock to know the exact time it is until after you’ve upgraded your house, so all you have to go by before that is the color of the environment and whether or not your character has played an animation to eat something (you’re automatically fed when you wake up, at noon, and at night). I discovered this because I was curious if I could actually see the wild dog by staying out, and left the game running for probably 20 minutes in real life only for nothing to happen. Because of the time freeze, the time after 6PM actually becomes really valuable for farm logistics. You can’t sell anything, no, but you can pull up all the weeds on the farm, water your crops, fix your fences, feed and care for animals if you hadn’t already, and harvest wood for fences and house upgrades which would have taken a lot of valuable time to get during shipping-hours. The only thing that gets in the way of doing all that is you running out of energy.

Your energy is what allows you to use your farming equipment like your ax or watering can. Running out of it doesn’t mean you fall unconscious or anything, but your character will play an animation of them stumbling over and will fail to use any tools. The most obvious fix to this is to simply go to bed, as sleeping gives you a full recharge. You can also, however, recharge it by going to the hot spring on the mountain, or by eating food bought at the restaurant in town or foraged for in the forest. You can’t tell easily how much is refilled, as there’s no visual indicator like a health bar, but you’re able to eat more than once, and jumping into the hot spring seems to count whether you did it or not more than how much time you spend in there, so you can hop in and out a couple of times and call it good.

Individually, time freezing at 6PM and energy being endlessly replenishable aren’t bad things. Even together, they’re not the worst. Having free time to focus on profitless chores is nice, and I think it’s important to be able to replenish your energy in case you have a limited amount of time to do things like for example, cut all of your grass before winter kills it. What makes an exploit out of these is the fact that the resources in the forest will never run out. Every time you re-enter the forest, all forage items and tree stumps are respawned. The infinite amount of forage makes for infinite energy refills, and could also make for an incredible money exploit if you didn’t have a very limited amount of time to ship things. You don’t have a limited amount of time to cut up tree stumps though. If you wanted to, you could run up to the forest after 6PM, chop every stump, then simply reload the area, and everything’s back. You can get all of the wood you would ever need to fully upgrade your house in one night. It’s a bit of a grind to do all at once, but it’s a grind you’d be doing over time anyways. It’s not the worst exploit in the world, since you still need money to pay for the house upgrade, but arguably because of how you have to focus your energy elsewhere for most of the game, the wood is the harder thing to get. Additionally, when the game has very little to do in both fall and winter due to the lack of crops, this exploit takes away just about any reason to play those two seasons other than to take care of animals. It’s an optional exploit of course–as all exploits are–but once you learn about it, it’s hard to resist the desire to get the grind out of the way all at once and mess up the pacing of the game.

The Charm of the Game

Learning that the fences were completely broken as a mechanic was a huge disappointment for me. From the moment I got a grasp on how the game was supposed to work, I wanted to eventually surround my whole field with fencing and keep my animals outside so I would have some life on my farm while I worked. I didn’t just want this, I was excited for it! This was something I’d never done in a farming sim that didn’t already manage putting animals in and out for you like Stardew Valley or newer Story of Seasons games do. My routine is always the same: I go into the barn and coop to tend to each of my animals, I take care of my crops outside, then run straight to town to talk to everyone, and go to bed. The change in routine that would come from taking care of the animals outside and patrolling the fence every night felt fresh to me. It made me feel that even though this was the first game of its kind, it was different and required new things of me. But in the end, I played it exactly the same.

Harvest Moon is still very different from all of the games that followed it, though. In many ways, it’s because it has less “stuff” in it– both in terms of items and things you have to do. But I wouldn’t say that it feels incomplete. Harvest Moon runs over the course of 2 and a half years before your work is evaluated. Until that happens, you have the ability to farm four different crops, you can raise both cows and chickens, you can upgrade your house to have more features, upgrade your working tools, build relationships with the townspeople to a small extent, go to town festivals that happen each year, and you can get married to one of the five girls living in town with whom you can have up to two children. Everything that you would come to expect as a fan of games like this is already here from the very first iteration. The most notable lack this game has, and one that seems to be completely unique to this game, is that there aren’t any crops in the fall or winter, which means that unless you have animals, there’s a whole half of the year that you don’t have anything to do. The game is clearly aware of this though, because in an average playthrough, this is where you’ll start to run into the story events.

There isn’t much of an overarching story in the game, past the general concept that you’ve run away from home to work on an abandoned farm. The conclusion rests on how good of a job you actually do. In between those two points are smaller events, usually tied to when you get tool upgrades or special ones for each of the romantic interests. The first event you’re likely to run into happens on the very last day of summer, where one of the woodsmen comes to your house in the morning to ask if you’re okay because he heard a huge crash at night and you should check your farm. What I found was that a tree in my field had fallen over, and its remaining stump had a big empty hole in it. When I inspected the stump, I was suddenly underground in a cave filled with loud and industrious music, and I was faced with two, little green people–Harvest Sprites, though I don’t know if they’re called that yet here. One asked me if my scythe worked well, and when I said yes, told me that they had made it and that I should check my shed tomorrow for a better one. Other tool upgrades are obtained in similar fashion; one comes from feeding a starving sprite a mushroom and another comes from another hole in the farm opening up to reveal another part of the cave system that has a couple of hints on how to unlock other things.

The events for romantic interests happen at less scripted times, as they’re tied to how strong your relationship is with each girl. Each girl only has one event, and it only triggers when your relationship is high enough that you would ask her to marry you. The events usually take up a whole day, and don’t necessarily add much to each character. Ellen’s revolves around how she’s no good at keeping pets– something established on your second day at the farm when you get your dog from her, Eve’s hammers in her fraught relationship with her grandpa, and Ann’s is about losing the chicken weathervane, or “weathercock” which sits on the roof of her workshop and goes missing every time there’s a storm. Conversely, Nina and Maria’s scenes bring up entirely new events that bring up a number of questions while providing no answers. Nina disappears while looking for a medicinal plant because her mother is apparently sick, and Maria vanishes for days until you find her hiding away with the woodsmen for some reason. All of these events, whether they share new information or not, manage to add some greatly appreciated depth to each character by giving them more room to speak and be sincere than their short and repetitive day-to-day dialogues do.

The dialogue in this game is simple, to the point, and sparse– probably because there was only so much memory that could be reserved for approximately 15 people who all have multiple lines of dialogue, and only so much money to pay someone to write more. There is simple dialogue that doesn’t tell you much more than “hello, how are you” would, more dialogue that I’d label as tutorial text, and a few lines that I truthfully couldn’t understand well because of the sub-par translation this game received for english. The dialogue that exists to inform the world really manages to create a unique vibe though. Nina’s dialogue, almost always about plants, goes into forays about how they’re creatures with wills to live, too. Ellen’s uncle who runs the ranch shop tells you that it’s much better to feed your animals fresh grass if you try to buy any from his store, and if you decline to purchase he laughs as if he’s won something. There’s even dialogue referencing the silent player! Multiple lines exist to comment on him not paying attention, and inspection prompts have people telling you not to touch something rather than being an item description. It was the last thing I expected, to get the same level of personality out of the main character as I did from each of the girls, albeit very subtly. He went from a kind of nothing, self-insert into being what I perceive to be a hyperactive boy, akin to a border collie who was let out into a field of sheep for the first time–the exact kind of person crazy enough to take on an abandoned farm and succeed.

It’s these short little character details that bring life into the game. Each day, you’ll really only see one line of dialogue from each character, be it new or old, with that dialogue usually only changing if there’s a change in season or festival coming up. The repetitive, pretty mindless routine of the game can turn into a sort of meditation if you let it, where you spend your time working thinking about the folks in town and what they had to say to you the previous day. The developers took this concept in stride and gave the side characters loads of dialogue about life, about God and religion, and about… very basic morals, but morals nonetheless. It’s a children’s game after all. When you take the thoughts, questions and prompts the characters give you back to the farm to do your long and tedious routine, you have to ask yourself– what are you working so hard for? For the feeling of accomplishment? Recognition from your peers? For the sake of some higher power, if you worship one? For me personally, it was to write this essay, but it was also for a good grade on the high score screen at the end, so to be honest a lot of this stuff was lost on me until just now when I was reviewing the game to get screenshots.

Setting The Standard - Why You Should Play HM SNES

You may read all of this and still think, well, it doesn’t sound like the game has much in it. And you would be right, it’s a very small game, but it’s also extremely quick. On average, my days only lasted about three minutes of real life time. Everything flew by, and I think I finished the game in 20 hours or less. I barely got a chance to notice that there wasn’t much going on because every second of my day was spent busy doing something, and when I wasn’t busy, the break was appreciated. I didn’t start to run out of things to do until I was finished with the second year, and when I looked up what I needed to do to get a decent ending, I was already most of the way there. It was easy to push through those last two seasons to get to the end, and it was so, so worth it.

As I mentioned earlier, the game ends with a high score screen, meaning it has to track all of your accomplishments. These include, but are not limited to: the number of things you ship, number of each crop you grow, number of animals you have and how much they like you, how upgraded your house is, who you married, how much all of the girls in town like you if you didn't get married, how many kids you have (which basically equates to how long you were married), your happiness score (increased by going to festivals and decreased by having animals die), and how many times you’ve pet your dog. In addition to these being tallied up and presented to you, you get special cutscenes not just for each one of these accomplishments, but additional ones for if you managed to do even better! I got a cutscene for having a cow, followed by one for having lots of cows, followed by yet another for having cows that loved me! Watching them play one after the other felt like taking a victory lap even without getting the best possible result. Seeing all of my numbers come up at the end made me want to try again to actually get those other cutscenes, not to get to see them, they’re so easy to find on Youtube, but because the game made it feel like an accomplishment! If I weren’t following this game up by immediately playing its GameBoy port, I absolutely would have started a new file right away. I’ve been playing the Harvest Moon series since I was a little kid and this was the first time I’d actually managed to beat one of these games. I struggle to think the finale of any game following this will feel as good as this one did.

I started writing this whole thing about the fences because it was an easy and silly entry point to get into my core issue with the game, and so I could have an opportunity to dig into game mechanics and the way the knowledge you have of them will completely alter your playstyle, because that’s all fun and interesting for me to talk about. Another reason why I focused on that was because it was near impossible for me to pick any kind of focus point when talking about this game. After all, I’m trying to study a whole series of games that spans multiple decades, and this is not only the first game in that series, but a game that created the whole genre of farming sims and defined that genre so thoroughly that you can see its DNA in every single game that followed.

I didn’t expect much to come out of my experience with this game. My expectations for it before I even picked it up were that it was going to be basically featureless, as informed by my experience with one of the first games I ever played as a child, Harvest Moon GB, which I will get into next. This game was not that at all. I think that everything it did manage to get working right came together just about perfectly. Harvest Moon is exactly what it wanted to be, and where it wasn’t, it lied about how it worked to try and make you play the correct way anyways. When I believed that lie, my time playing was even more enjoyable. Maybe if farming worked just a little bit more like how you’re told it’s supposed to, and if there was just a little bit more story, those would cover the things I felt wanting for the most. But maybe a little flexibility and ambiguity is a good thing. Maybe actually maintaining a fence is just too hard, and maybe if the girls were more fleshed out, I wouldn’t be able to enjoy filling in their gaps in my head.

There are many more things I could say and wanted to say about this game, but this has grown far too long already so I'm cutting myself off here. I'm sure my later entries aren't going to get near this length. If you managed to get to this point, thank you so much for reading!

#harvest moon #story of seasons #harvest moon snes #hm snes #game review #m.txt #hm posting #i think i hit the image cap also? it wouldn't let me put in more even though i dont think there are that many. maybe it was a different cap #im happy to answer questions about things i didnt cover here too lol and i have notes from my playthrough if anyone is interested in those #those notes are the only reason i was able to keep all of this straight given how long it took me to write #anyways finally hitting post after like 3 days because i keep forgetting until weird hours

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legobiwan · 1 year ago

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I find it interesting that king boo and dimentio see luigi as the bigger threat or nuisance in king boos case seems like the most dangerous villains tend to focus more on luigi than mario also what are your thoughts on antasma?

I think King Boo in particular is interesting as he went from having no particular opinion about Luigi (you get the feeling that he would have captured whichever brother had entered the mansion first in LM1) to holding a festering hatred of Luigi by the time we hit the third LM game. You almost get the sense King Boo regarded Luigi as a someone laughable until he actually fought through the entire mansion and beat King Boo. And I think at that point, King Boo just fixated on Luigi as this seemingly cowardly, anxiety-prone, far less famous of the Mario brothers who brought down his ambitions Three Whole Times. By the time we hit LM3 (and I haven't played Dark Moon yet, have only watched some cut scenes for writing purposes), it strikes me that King Boo doesn't give a damn about Mario or Peach or the Toads, only their value in luring Luigi through what I would contend is a drawn-out, premeditated gauntlet of 15-ish levels of ghoulish battle. It's almost like he wants to watch Luigi beat these ghosts who he obviously holds zero regard for, only so he can finally top this nemesis of his and assert his dominance over the ghostly population. Wild stuff.

On the other hand, we have Dimentio, our favorite bastard magic man. Unlike King Boo, the minute Luigi came into his orbit, you get the feeling Dimentio was gunning for him. (Whether or not Dimentio had scouted out Luigi and the gang prior to the Chaos Heart's arrival is up for debate, but it does raise the interesting question of why Luigi was marked to be brainwashed while Peach and Bowser and Mario were left to their own devices. Now, was this the Count's own idea due to what was written in the Dark Prognosticus or was DImentio whispering in his ear? I'm not entirely certain, but by the time Luigi/Mr. L came to Castle Bleck, Dimentio would have been tracking him, to phrase it as Dimentio would, like a bloodhound denied his nightly dinner).

All this is to say, Dimentio was laser-focused on Luigi and worse yet, because Dimentio is a cunning, manipulative asshole, he read all of Luigi's insecurities that got blasted about in his Mr. L form like a child's picture book. For Dimentio, I think, he sees not only a tool but someone who could ultimately be swayed to his side, had he the time. A man of a terrible potential he doesn't even realize, anxiety masking a hundred and one other emotions Luigi either can't or won't recognize. (I've mentioned this elsewhere, but I am 100% convinced Luigi's anxiety is, to a degree, a coping mechanism so he doesn't have to deal with the more complicated, sometimes darker emotions and thoughts whirling around his head).

I have yet to play M&L: Dream Team, but I have seen some takes on Antasma and his relationship with Luigi, who seems play a pivotal role in this game. I'm excited to get to this one (it's one of the next on my list after I finish Thousand Year Door! That and Dark Moon!) so I'll have to report back once I've gotten into it.

But I would say to your assertion that the more dangerous villains are drawn to Luigi -

Let's think about it this way. Mario is a known variable. He's a hero, he's incorruptible, at least according to the stories. His role is to beat the bad guys, to stand in their way, to protect and be the guardian of the moral high ground. The villains want to defeat him.

Luigi, however, is a little more complicated. He shares the same desire to protect as Mario, to be the hero and stand on the moral high ground but...we see the way he acts in the Paper Mario series, the overblown language, the way he wants to be included, the way the Toads treat him, the way he's referred to so often as number two, the way his anxiety is out in the open. Luigi presents as someone a lot more malleable than Mario is, as someone who could not only be defeated, but exploited. And, of course, each time Luigi defies those expectations because he's a lot stronger and braver than he presents (although he's always complicated). And it's the type of thing where I imagine it's partially that the villains feel their egos are bruised by their defeat coming from the "other brother," on one hand, and on the other, there's that promise they see in Luigi, whether or not he'd actually betray his brother, but they see those shades of grey in him, see something they could use and it has to be alluring to them.

(Not to mention Luigi's penchant for magic - the Thunderhand, his weird negative dimension thing in the Smash Brothers series, his dream capabilities - unlike Mario, Luigi's abilities tend to fall into the more fantastical and in tandem with his engineering skills, have the potential to make him so, so powerful. If He Ever Tapped Into That Side of Himself.)

#hello there #ask legobiwan #luigi #dimentio #king boo #antasma #it's very similar to the way villains in the star wars universe tend to obsess over obi wan #when anakin is by all rights the more powerful jedi #different fandoms with different contexts but the idea remains the same

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dogmomwrites · 1 year ago

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Writeblr Positivity tag

This tag came from @aether-wasteland-s, so thank you for including me in this game!

Passing it along with shoutouts rather than tags at the end of the QnA

What motivates you to write? I gotta get it out of my head, man (neutral). It’s in there like a splinter and writing it is the only way to keep it from festering, it’s the only way I can move on to a new OC or scenario to obsess over.

A line/short snippet of your writing that you are most proud/happy of. If not, maybe share a line of someone else's work you love (just please credit them) To say the sun shone brightly would be an insult to the brilliance of the rays that day. (^ this is the opening line to a random WIP I’ve not really shared anything from, that being due to the fact that I never got very far in that particular WIP. I wrote it around 2am several years ago, then fell asleep, and when I woke up, I had no memory of writing it.)

Which OC makes you smile every time you think/ talk about them and what are they like? Going with a non-MC here, I’m gonna say Mickey from my Castle series. He’s a goof. He’s a top-notch fighter. He’s one of their elitist elites. He’s wholly smitten with another character, very obvious about his puppy love, but thinks she has no idea. He’s the type who people look up to with admiration as he walks by, but in his head, he’s thinking about how tiny baby mice are and trying not to cry over it. He's failing at not crying.

What process of writing do you enjoy the most? Seeing your rotisserie chicken finally down on paper, be it digital or otherwise. It’s relieving and exciting and you wanna shove it in everyone’s faces but at the same time you’d probably rather die than share it.

What part of writing do you think you are the best at? (Yes, stroke your own ego it's okay) Characters first. Dialogue second. It’s been that way since I first started writing and has never changed. I’ve been told multiple times that my characters are by far my strongest point.

I’ll admit I’m inclined to agree, and honestly, I’d prefer this being my writing strength. Characters are the most important aspect of a story when I read or watch anything, so it makes sense that priority translates to my own work.

What is something in the writeblr community that is most enjoyable? The camaraderie. It’s just a big, supportive family (that I’ve been absent from lately oops just consider me the eccentric aunt who swoops in and throws tags everywhere like presents at christmas and then disappears again until next year lmao)

A writing tool/device you use that helps you with writing? (It could be speech to text, a writing program, etc) I’ll be honest, I don’t really use writing tools. If I need to jot anything down, I use a notebook. My key writing tool would probably be Spotify lmao

A piece of worldbuilding that you like in your own story? (It could be the magic system, a particular place in the story, a law, etc) I mean, I have talking animals. That’s the bee’s knees.

What piece of advice would you say to encourage others to write if they are having a rough patch? Why not write? Nothing gets easier by not doing it.

Tag some people whose works you love/have been your biggest supporters! I am 100% gonna forget some people in this and I apologize wholeheartedly. My memory is not as good as my forgottery. @marinesocks, @fearofahumanplanet, @wildjuniperjones, @andromedaexists, @cljordan-imperium, @breath-of-eternity, @smol-feralgremlin, @saltysupercomputer, and so many others

#writeblr positivity tag game #writer positivity #tag game #writer games #open tag #open to everyone

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m34gs · 2 years ago

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For that AU ask: Everything is the same except Grimmjow is made honourary captain at the end of the series. He has no idea.

Thank you for the ask friend! (from this post!)

Hehehe, this is gonna be so fun :D

Kenpachi is ecstatic. *TWO* captain-level shinigami who almost always accept his challenge to fight and can go toe to toe with him? With Grimmjow being made honourary captain, his travel to and from soul society is notably easier, so Kenpachi can challenge him even MORE. Grimmjow has, as you said, no clue that this is the case. He doesn't know why he's suddenly more welcome and nor does he really question it. He's not one for a ton of introspection (hurts a little too much to think about the why and how of things, given his history) so he just takes it as it comes and kind of rolls with it. Needless to say, he likes having another sparring partner, and Kurosaki is grateful for the break... hahaha

Most of the other captains are a little irate with the situation, and the lieutenants are down-right insulted at first. In fact, there are only a handful of shinigami who actually respect the decision from the get-go: Kenpachi (obviously), Urahara (because of course), Shunsui (he made the decision), Shinji (he and the Visords know better than anyone how it is to be like a hollow; of course he doesn't think twice about having a hollow as an honourary captain), Yoruichi (I like to think her and Grimmjow bond over being cats), and...Byakuya. Because he's been uptight about tradition all this time and look where that got him...yeah I like to think by the end of it he's ready to burn shit to the ground. I think it makes him happy to see Grimmjow bestowed with a title because it makes the rest of the Byakuya noble family grumble and he enjoys watching them be upset. I also think he would like to be smug about it. "But this is what the Captain of Squad One decided," he'd remind them. "We cannot dishonour his decision." He gets to beat them at their own game of rules and polite society. And they can't even be mad this time because he's not breaking any tradition at all.

Ichigo is actually worried. He has felt before on some occasions he was being used or treated like a tool; he worries about Grimmjow feeling the same. This prompts him to tell the arrancar after a sparring match "You know, you can talk to me about stuff. I don't mind, might even understand," in his awkward Ichigo way. Grimmjow completely misunderstands and must go to Orihime for advice because "Kurosaki wants me to talk to him about stuff and I don't know what stuff he means. Teach me human things so I can talk to him." Orihime thinks this is a perfectly logical interpretation and so she decides to teach Grimmjow...how to cook. This goes as well as anyone outside that duo would expect. :D

The first time someone calls him "Captain", Grimmjow just stares at them for a very long time with half squinted eyes. Finally, he says "I'm the King, not a captain", (which is debatable because Hallibel lives...but no one else really understands the politics in Hueco Mundo and Grimmjow isn't about to go into any detail that would potentially derail his self-proclaimed position). This leads to panic because it was a newbie shinigami that Grimmjow spoke to, and now all the rookies have rumours going around that Grimmjow is actually somehow Soul Society Royalty.

Orihime is the one who actually tells Grimmjow. They're having tea together and she asks "so what's it like, being an honourary captain?" and Grimmjow goes "huh?" and so she explains and suddenly things make a lot more sense to the arrancar. But when the rookies call him "Your Highness", he does not correct them. :) Hope you enjoyed these little headcannons! I had fun coming up with them and answering!!

#asks #ask game #friends #kimium #responses #bleach #grimmjow #honourary captain grimmjow

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trainergraceneedstherapy · 2 years ago

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Suddenly got nostalgic.

It's funny how much I talk about Unova without actually-TALKING about Unova. I miss it, for sure. I just-..it's home. It may not be where I'm from, but I will ALWAYS be a Unovan at heart. That's where my story began after all-where I met him. Well-one of the hims you're probably getting sick and tired of me rambling about on here but-..he was one of the first people to respect me as a trainer, even if He didn't exactly AGREE with me.

He was-..well-in a bad situation. The older I get, the more I understand what was going on and the more ENRAGED I become about how unfair it was. And the more I want to kick that so called father of his' ASS again.

Unova is where I learned people and pokemon BELONG together-where I learned to hold my dreams-my convictions, my truths, MYSELF-tight and never let go, keep FIGHTING-but to accept the viewpoints of others, even if you don't agree. (Unless that viewpoint is hurting other people. Then it's ass whooping time.)

I didn't know what to say back then, when he left. All I could think about was what he asked me. What he-asked me in that stupid cave I kept getting lost in. (Fuck chargestone cavern.)

'Grace, Do you have a dream?'

He looked me in the eye-I was younger than him then, but he still asked me-like I was his peer. Like we were equals and that-..it meant so much, after everything. ..And I still said no. I-had no IDEA what I wanted then. I didn't think about what I wanted to be-what I wanted to do.

And he said to me-

"Dream your dream! Then, pursue the ideals to make that dream a reality, and someday you will achieve all that you dreamed of!"

...I can still hear that last "Farewell!" even now.

I wonder if he's out there somewhere. I mean-I would HOPE he isn't like-dead in a ditch somewhere! For someone that kind, that brilliant-it would be a horrible fate. ..I just wonder sometimes.

...Hey kingy...

I finally figured out my dream. You proud of me..?

(OOC Rambling time: Sorry about this long ass lore post-I was feeling nostalgic.

My first official pokemon game (Not the Spin-offs like the Mystery Dungeon series, Conquest, and my REAL first pokemon game, Pokepark 1 and 2.) was White 2. I guess i should have started with the originals, but i was 10 back then, i didn't know any better! Anyway, my first encounter with N was in chargestone cave, and i was pretty confused. So, i looked up and watched a couple youtubers (Marriland, Munchingorange, ect.) play through the first game to see what the heck was going on, and BOY, did N's story steal my heart. He quickly became my favorite character, and you can't imagine my excitement when he showed up in the anime series! (i used to watch it all the time when i was little, starting with the Diamond and Pearl series) His story really made me think about the fact that these pokemon i was training weren't just tools, but living, breathing beings. Characters in their own right! In short, despite having its fair share of flaws, Unova will always have a special place in my heart, along with the "Freak without a Human heart" whose title couldn't be farther from the truth. Thank you, Gamefreak, for creating a memory that will last a lifetime.

And thank you, N, for being a teacher of sorts for a kid who had NO CLUE what she was doing back then.)

#pokeblogging #trainer grace lore #pokemon au #pokemon irl #unreality #Unova pride #ooc post #kinda

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hopinglylost3214 · 2 years ago

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Helloooo! First off, hust found your blog and it honestly perked me up from a serious funk, so thank you for that 😊 Second, I don’t know if you’re still answering that tickle ask post, but if you are, here are the ones I wanted to ask! (If it’s too many, you can choose which ones you wanna answer, I just liked em all so much 🤣)

4. What would be your entrance music?

5. Can you think of a fictional character you think would make a good lee? Can you think of a fictional character you think would make a good ler?

6. What's one topic you could talk about endlessly?

12. What, in your opinion, is 10/10 fiction? (It could be a TV series, movie, book, game, or anything.)

13. Are there any tools you'd like to be tickled with? Are there any tools you'd like to tickle someone with?

17. What do you think about having music in the background while being tickled? What do you think about having music in the background while tickling someone?

19. What puts you in a lee mood? What puts you in a ler mood?

21. How did you come up with your Tumblr username?

23. What was the most recent tickle scenario or tickle fantasy you thought about?

24. What do you prefer between a cold day and a hot day?

25. Do you ever have tickle dreams?

27. Tickle interrogation, yes or no?

28. What do you like to do to comfort yourself?

30. What, in your opinion, is a 10/10 song?

Hello, I'm really happy to hear you enjoyed my blog!

As for the questions, I didn't expect to be the one answering, but I'll try my best lol. Glad you liked my questions though!

4. What would be your entrance music?

this one! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2xx_2XNxxfA

5. Can you think of a fictional character you think would make a good lee? Can you think of a fictional character you think would make a good ler?

Robin from One Piece would make a good ler. Her power is that she can manifest hands anywhere she wants

6. What's one topic you could talk about endlessly?

philosophy, I read quite a few philosophy books when I was a kid.

12. What, in your opinion, is 10/10 fiction? (It could be a TV series, movie, book, game, or anything.)

TV show: The Good Place

Game: Transistor(it's a game made by same people who made Hades)

Movie: Most recently, Everything Everywhere all at once, also Into the Spiderverse.

13. Are there any tools you'd like to be tickled with? Are there any tools you'd like to tickle someone with?

I think I'd like to try a brush of some sort. I want to know if it tickles like some people say it does.

17. What do you think about having music in the background while being tickled? What do you think about having music in the background while tickling someone?

I like the idea, but my playlist is like 50% sad songs, so probably gonna need music rec from the lee lol.

19. What puts you in a lee mood? What puts you in a ler mood?

I identify as a ler, but I'm curious about being a lee in the sense that I want to know what I'm giving.

As for ler mood, I kind of want to say like, I'm always in one? kind of??

21. How did you come up with your Tumblr username?

My thought process was, "okay, let's come up with two-word combination that sounds vaguely deep, then add some numbers"

23. What was the most recent tickle scenario or tickle fantasy you thought about?

24. What do you prefer between a cold day and a hot day?

Cold day, all day every day. Hot and humid is one of the worst combinations.

25. Do you ever have tickle dreams?

Yes

27. Tickle interrogation, yes or no?

Yes. But in terms of doing it in a real life, I'd prefer it to be more playful than serious.

28. What do you like to do to comfort yourself?

Take a hot shower, that usually works, even though my showers are always hot ha. Or I guess, I just think about how I'm sad lol.

30. What, in your opinion, is a 10/10 song?

There are many many answers, but I'll just list two:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WCphVz0ZGns

youtube

Thank you!

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mollywog · 2 years ago

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How could you translate Katniss' internal thoughts to screen?

If you become the screenwriter for the new adaptation, what would you do?

Are there any movies or tv series which have good example of this type of narration?

Thank you 😊

@curiousnonny

Interesting question @curiousnonny!

First of all - I’m all about a mini-series. Give it the time needed to tell the whole story and extra time to build the universe, characters, and relationships

I apparently have a lot of thoughts, but if we’re just talking about how to translate internal thoughts …

Flashbacks

Scenes explaining the games from the district’s perspective.

Some thoughts…

Everdeens and Hawthorns standing together at mandatory viewing watching the reaping recap or interviews from Johanna’s game: Gale commenting on Jo appearing weak and sniveling. The idea of careers could be introduced to the viewers. AND Katniss half listening, half busy stealing glances at Peeta in the crowd

Another mandatory viewing scene from Jo’s year after the games have begun: Gale in aw of the mechanics of Johanna’s strategy and Katniss wincing at the brutality of a death by axe.

This might help understanding Katniss’s strategy after volunteering. If you hadn’t read the books, you maybe wouldn’t understand why Katniss is acting so… flat? But I wouldn’t solely rely on the flashbacks for that: I would want Katniss to show More emotions - The first movie was too subtle for me. I get it, she trying to appear bored: accomplished, but meanwhile I’m bored.

Katniss’s strategy is about her appearance to the crowd. I’d love some shots of her feeling things when no one is looking.

Think about the scene of her alone in her room in the tribute center playing with the buttons… wasted.

A shot of the three in an elevator, Haymitch and Peeta standing in front, Katniss staggered behind them and letting herself feel nervous or get excited about the elevator: Anything

There are no cameras during ‘more than just a piece in their games.’ Give me the real scene where they are snippy and Katniss storms off.

Also have shots of her cracking and showing some real (subtle) emotions in public for just a moment so we can see that she’s making a concerted effort not to show emotion.

And scowling: I would have her scowling all over the place haha.

I also think Madge is important for several reasons, but one being: She shows us that Katniss doesn’t 100% ‘buy’ the whole merchant vs seam thing. Katniss (and Gale) are actually progress thinkers in this way. They hold biases about the merchants but also can recognize it as a Capital driven division.

I’d add some rants in the woods scenes as discussed in the book:

You can see why someone like Madge, who has never been at risk of needing a tessera, can set him off. The chance of her name being drawn is very slim compared to those of us who live in the Seam. Not impossible, but slim. And even though the rules were set up by the Capitol, not the districts, certainly not Madge's family, it's hard not to resent those who don't have to sign up for tesserae.

Gale knows his anger at Madge is misdirected. On other days, deep in the woods, I've listened to him rant about how the tesserae are just another tool to cause misery in our district. A way to plant hatred between the starving workers of the Seam and those who can generally count on supper and thereby ensure we will never trust one another. "It's to the Capitol's advantage to have us divided among ourselves," he might say if there were no ears to hear but mine. If it wasn't reaping day. If a girl with a gold pin and no tesserae had not made what I'm sure she thought was a harmless comment.

#curiousnonny #katniss everdeen #gale hawthorne #Peeta Mellark #thg #the hunger games #hunger games

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carnellousthecat · 10 months ago

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So, two days ago marks the first day I've ever posted to a blog anywhere in my life, and I'm thirty years old lol. Been a lurker on this site for a long time, seen the seasons come and go, the trends

okay that's enough waxing poetical. My previous post proved a couple people might read my stuff so I'm gonna find something to talk about. I think today's topic will be... Super Smash Brothers

So story time, growing up I was a microsoft kid. Dad worked at microsoft, our pcs were windows, our consoles were xboxes, you know how it is. This means the only times I ever got to play any nintendo property was over at a friend's place. Back in high school one time I went to a friend's and there was a gamecube there. My friend was playing on the 360 so I was like "can I play the gamecube?" and my friend was like yeah totally bruh or something idk, 2010s shit lol. So I looked through the games and found: Metroid Prime. I thought, that's the character from Smash Brothers! I've always loved playing as her! I knew two things about her. One, she was secretly a woman under the suit, and two, she was from a game called Metroid. So here was my chance to play Metroid Prime.

I am not exaggerating when I say, that single session of Metroid Prime got me thirsting for the entire series, something I would not experience until earlier this year, when I heard Metroid Prime was available to play on the Nintendo Switch. I legit dropped like 300 dollars on a Switch just to play that. And pokemon. I'd never played pokemon, my girlfriend seems to like it. Maybe I should give it a go?

Anyway, now we come to the last couple of days. I finally caved and decided to buy myself super smash brothers ultimate, a game I had always dreamed of owning so I could practice and stand a chance against all my friends! I've been playing it almost nonstop since I bought it, it's such a blast, even did a couple fights with my girlfriend, that was fun!

And I got to thinking. What's the pro scene like?

See, I knew some things about the smash pro scene. I watched like maybe one or two matches, I knew that meme where the sweaty smash bros player goes "four stock, final destination, NO ITEMS!" and I always thought that was just... boring. When I played with my friends it was four player free for all every time, and we'd pick random fun stages and have a blast literally blasting each other into lava or acid or the sky or something. That just sounds a lot more fun to me.

So, if that's more fun to play, why does the pro scene sound so much more boring to someone like me who's only got a passing understanding of it and has never been interested? Whenever my more sweaty friends decided they'd have enough of the party game and went "1v1! Final Destination! No-" you get the picture, I immediately tuned out. I had no chance of winning because I didn't have any of the tools I used to use to get by in the free for all games. Doing unexpected things, spotting and using the right item at the right time, being more effective at platforming when the stage is falling out of the sky or something, and being tactical with who I engaged with and who I should just do that Godzilla meme with. You know the one. Those were skills I had from general gaming, and I could employ them in ways even my non-switch owning ass self could understand clearly and instantly.

So. If I, the casual consumer, was bored and tuned out every time the game inexplicably turned into Street Fighter, and had such a blast with literally anything other than that, then, why is that like the only type of thing they play at pro matches?

Limited stages to the most bare bones and simple ones. No free for all tournaments, but one v ones and team ones instead, absolutely no items save for the smash ball usually, someone correct me if I'm wrong but from my understanding that's the type of thing they do at tournaments.

See, I was talking to my friend who's an absolute legend veteran of fighting games, has been to tournaments, has a custom "hit box" I thought he called it, basically this chunky board with buttons and sticks like an old arcade game, coolest shit I've ever seen. I was trying to explain my frustrations and he said something that stuck with me, something along the lines of, any random element introduced into a match immediately ruins it. I was trying to explain that in my hypothetical smash bros tournament the victor wouldn't be decided by a single match but probably five matches in random stages or more so the law of averages applies and whatnot (not sure that's what the law of averages is but ykwim) but, you know, even in random chaos, play enough matches and a clear victor emerges, that's always been the norm with sports. You don't do a single bout of football, you smash into your opponents again and again and again and again for hours to make abundantly clear when one team has absolutely destroyed the other and there can be no question about it.

So, what makes a good sport. Not even esport, what makes a fun and watchable sport. I have a few ideas.

Personalities. You need recognizable names and personalities that the layman can easily get to know in a way that little narratives and rivalries and legends start to form around them. This is something in esports already obviously.

Simplicity and readability. A person just tuning into a football match for the first time in their life should be able to quickly pick up what's going on.

Relatability. The sport should be a high stakes version of a game we all play. Who hasn't played catch, or thrown a football, or kicked a futbol, or swung a tennis racket at least once in their life. You have experience with the sport and you know how it's played because you have played it.

Excitement. A match of a sport should have an ebb and flow, it should change in easily understandable ways, you need to be able to tell easily when one team is winning and the other team is losing, when they're having a comeback, when things are getting exciting because they're changing.

Skill. When watching the sport it should be immediately abundantly clear to all watching who is the single best player in the world.

So putting all this stuff together, let me tell you what I learned from experimenting with the game for the past couple days.

I was on my own mostly so I had to play with bots. I missed the free for alls so I did that, four player ffa, I always liked some of the items so I turned select ones on at low frequency or whatever, they show up less often, and on every match I'd switch to a different stage that looked interesting.

I was pretty rusty so I experimented a bit with the CPU difficulty until I was just about able to hold my own just enough that the outcome wasn't always sure, I would win about 1/4 of the time, which should happen when there's four players.

But then for kicks I swapped to the one v one final destination style, with the simple stages and such. And I discovered something amazing.

Even though there was no one on my team helping me, the cpu player at the exact same difficulty as the FFA game became a complete pushover, I had to go up two difficulty levels just for it to stand a chance. I noticed from observing that the lower difficulty npc was acting in some very odd ways. Doing things players never ever do. Sometimes they'd walk slowly unshielded. Sometimes they'd just stand still, any player of smash bros knows the name of the game is keep moving at all times, depending on the character you might try to never touch the ground. And I'm sure 90% of players don't know it's even possible to walk slowly. The npc had a handicap on that made it behave in a way that was SO much easier than any real player.

So... why was the FFA harder at the same npc difficulty?

I thought about it and see, computers have an ability that humans will never be able to replicate. The ability to think instantly. They can absorb almost any amount of basic information and follow algoritms on it in a heartbeat. Essentially what this means is that an NPC player is omnipresent. It knows and processes every single bit of input, event, any change that happens to the stage even though they're on the opposite side of the map, instantly frame by frame, and this ability is SO powerful that they had to add a ridiculous handicap that made the computer players do shit real players never ever do.

And then I thought. What if a human could do that?

Imagine if you will, a huge stage, four players duking it out in FFA, items raining on them, the stage changing dramatically, sometimes even purposefully by players, the stage being selected at random every subsequent match until a clear winner from the four is declared.

But the people playing are the greatest Smash Brothers Ultimate players in the entire world.

Wouldn't you pay to see that? I would absolutely pay to see that.

See, what happens when you introduce "random elements" is that the pro player has to have a response ready in reflex time for every single possible event that could change the board state. They'd have to learn the intricacies and mechanics of every single stage in the game. They'd have to familiarize themselves with every item and be able to pick out which it is when there's a mosh pit of four players scrambling on top of it with a bunch of flashing effects and kicks. There might be item metas, which are unique to every stage, there might be special tactics about when to engage and when to stay out of a bout because it benefits that lone player in the mosh pit.

The thing about a 3v3 co op match is that there are only two possible outcomes. One team wins, or the other team wins. So yeah, it's excitingg when they're getting close to winning. You probably have one team you like that you'd rather won the match and so when it gets close to that happening or not happening you get excited.

Well, imagine if every match actually had 4 possible endings. Four personalities, four titans of Smash, who know every single stage by heart, who have items they prefer over others, who are known for being good at Corneria but not at... idk that metroid one that's constantly spinning and there's lava under it and everyone hates that map but unexplicably Sonicfox is unstoppable there. And as stocks start to dwindle, these unbeatable and instantly recognizable titans start to get picked off one by one by one.

See that's what I learned. I played free for all games with like 6 npc players and me, it was chaos, things were happening everywhere constantly all over the screen. And when I got knocked out early I stuck around to watch and see how it turns out. Maybe I'd get knocked out SUPER early and there's still like four players on the board.

Now imagine that situation at a event. One person is knocked out. And then another. And then another. It's down to three of them now and while your favorite player is out already two of them you also love but one you despise with pure rage. And the two you like are fighting each other instead of the one you hate, and they're about to both get knocked out! Then it's just down to the one you hate and the one you love, after that arduous chaos, that gauntlet of insanity it's just down to one player against the other.

And then the guy you hate wins.

But don't worry, there's ten more rematches to go, and maybe they'll get corneria! Your favorite Ducunt player might still have a chance.

This is what I'm saying. Super Smash Brothers is severly slept on, it has SO much potential. The developers crafted a game with an incredible cavalcade of mechanics and the esports only interact with like maybe 20% of them. And if you walk from the smash game to the guilty gear or tekken or street fighter booths or even other arena fighters and what have you, you're in for just about the same thing. A couple of guys or more hitting each other like it's a boxing match.

Which is exciting! Obviously! Boxing matches are fucking exciting as hell! But if you want a boxing match you could go to the boxing match booth, or you could go to the six player free for all extravaganza that reminds you of that tv show with all the squids.

I think about this kind of thing often. Games like Chivalry pit armies of 32 players against each other in huge objective based modes. It's a hell of a lot of fun to play, but what if every single player there was a master at their craft? What if that huge 32 player team was like an entire army of personalities who've mastered the art of cooperation on the field of battle, professional warriors at their peak cooperating like an entire football team, with demarcated leadership, with a single general or whatever, professional comm chatter. It would be like a world record Wow guild doing a thingy thing but it's PVP and the entire world is watching.

I would pay to watch that. Wouldn't you?

#super smash ultimate #super smash bros #fighting games

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larkawolfgirl · 2 years ago

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Tell Me Pedulum (Juna/Altina)

Rating: General Audiences Archive Warning: No Archive Warnings Apply Category: F/F Fandom: 英雄伝説閃の軌跡 | Sen no Kiseki | The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel Series (Video Games) Relationship: Juna Crawford/Altina Orion Characters: Emma Millstein, Juna Crawford Additional Tags: Fortune Telling, Crushes

Summary: Juna asks Emma to tell her love fortune.

Read on ao3

“Hey, uh, Emma?” came Juna’s voice behind her.

Emma put her book back on the bookshelf and turned around to see the younger girl looking slightly embarrassed. “Yes, Juna?” Emma asked kindly.

“I was wondering if you could read my fortune.”

That wasn’t something that Emma had a lot of experience in. She preferred focusing on healing and offensive spells, especially since divination and the like were areas that often gave witches a bad rep. None of her friends had treated her differently after finding out she was a witch, but the new class VII had never had a chance to see her differently. Emma would hate to be treated as the local swindler gypsy. However, Juna seemed sincere in her request, so Emma figured she might as well give it a try.

“I am not very good, so it might not be entirely accurate” she warned her.

Juna frowned. “Oh. It can’t hurt to try, though, can it?”

Emma smiled. “No, it can’t. I just don't want you to be disappointed.”

She led her into her bedroom at the Atelier. There, she pulled out her tarot cards, crystals, runes, and pendulums. “Do you have a preference for which method I use?”

Juna looked at the array of tools Emma had spread across a wooden table. “I guess not.”

Emma didn’t know Juna too well, but she was surprised to see that the normally firey girl seemed to be closing herself off. “What do you want to inquire about?”

Juna rubbed her wrist. “My love life.”

Emma smiled in relief. Juna was most likely only embarrassed then. “Alright. Then, we can either use tarot cards to see the potential of your overall love life or use the pendulum to ask direct yes and no questions.”

Juna’s face perked up. “Let’s use the pendulum.”

Smiling, Emma moved the other tools to the side and lifted her pendulum made from clear quartz. Her hope was that a clear quartz would give the clearest answers. “Show me yes,” she said, watching as the pendulum moved in a straight line. “Show me no,” she said, watching as it spun in a circle. “Show me uncertain,” she said, watching as it spun in the other direction.

Emma kept a steady grip and gaze on the pendulum. “Speak your first question.”

“Do they like me back?” Juna asked.

The pendulum moved in a straight line but then began to spin. Emma bit her lip. “I think it is trying to say that it depends on what you mean by liking you. There is hope at least.”

Juna nodded. “Do they like someone else?”

The pendulum spun for a no response. “It is definitely hopeful then,” Emma said

“Should I confess?”

The pendulum remained still. “I think you’re question needs to be more clear. If Juna confesses to this person, will her feelings be returned?”

The pendulum moved in a straight line.

Juna grinned. “So, I have a shot?”

The pendulum moved in a straight line.

“Will we be happy together?”

The pendulum spun for a second before straightening its path. “I think that it is saying that it might not be as happy as you wish right away, but you will get there. Or it may mean that you will have ups and downs?” The only clear thing about the answer was that it was unclear.

Juna shook her head. “That’s okay, Emma. It seems promising either way, right?”

Emma nodded and set the pendulum down on the table. “May I ask who this person is?”

Juna’s cheeks flushed and her eyes drifted. There was a pause, but then her shoulders sagged as if the energy to fight was leaving her. “Allie…”

“Oh.” Emma was surprised. Now the answers made more sense. She reached over the table and took Juna’s hands in hers. “I think I get it now. I don't think the pedulum can provide clear answers because Altina is unclear. She isn’t fully in touch with her emotions yet. That means that she may like you but not understand it.”

“Y-yeah.” A spark of hope ignited in Juna's eyes. “Which means I just need to show her what liking someone is like, right?”

Her optimism was endearing. “I’m sure things will work out for you. At the very least, Altina likes you as a friend, so you have nothing to worry about.”

“Right!” Juna nodded and pumped her fist. “Maybe I should go tell her right now.”

Emma let out a light laugh. To think Juna was holding back when she first came to her. Now she reminded her of a horse ready to speed down the racetrack. “Best of luck to you.”

“Thanks, Emma!” Juna waved before rushing out the door.

#sen no kiseki #trails of cold steel #juna x altina #trails #trails of #legend of heroes #my writing #fanfic #fanfiction

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devsgames · 10 months ago

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okay okay you got me @pigdeons

This initial thought was brought on from a memory when years ago a rando person online tried to put me on blast for arguing that objective markers are generally a good thing.

Their argument was essentially that "good" games shouldn't have objective markers at all, because it's not "immersive", and essentially that if a game has objective markers it means that the Level Designer failed to make a "good" Level Design because it doesn't lead the player effectively. I think this sentiment is fairly common too; that if a game has "good" level design then it should successfully lead you around a space by default with no assistance, or else the Level Designer has failed.

So first off, I think "good" design is a myth. Generally, I don't believe design is "good" or "bad", and referring to it as such is something that I just fundamentally do not agree with. Rather, I believe that design just has varying levels of success for different types of audiences - it's subjective to who is playing and what methods are used, and this is determined by many factors (culture, psychology, thought process, learning style, etc). Rather, I think the goal of any designer should be to try and cover the widest range of cases possible.

One person might navigate a series of objectives successfully with zero issues without the use of something at all times telling them where to go, while someone else might flounder completely without something holding their hand the whole way. Both of these are valid players who should be catered to, and one doesn't need to implicitly be held to a higher standard on the basis of personal preference or game vision.

I also think that generally in level design, if you're building any kind of objective-based gameplay that isn't a straight hallway with one exit and no distractions where the gameplay is hard scripted to execute in an exact way...well then you're going to lose players.

Someone will always get turned around. Someone will always press the wrong button. Someone will always be too slow. Someone will always forget what they're supposed to do. Someone will always struggle to find the path to get to point B.

Do I wish that players just knew where to go and what to do all the time so we could just build worlds that are implicitly understood? Totally! Unfortunately that's just not how Level Design works, especially not when building a whole game.

At this point in my career I have watched hours of players playing the levels I have made, and I have never seen a group of players - in playtests or in the wild - all have the exact same perfect experience navigating a space of any kind. I've seen people beat levels with no help, blind, first try with no problems at all, as well as players who have to toddle their way meticulously from point to point. Unless your level design is so dirt simple that a mullosk could do it, it simply doesn't happen and you'll always have people who will struggle through it. It's the same in real life - if you sit and watch people on any street corner for any amount of time you're going to see someone at some point or another get lost. It's just how people are.

Hence, there's always people out there that step-by-step influence will be vital for, and objective markers are something that lifts a skill floor up for those people to engage with your game. For some, that moment of confusion could be when they quit, and a guidance tool like markers could be the thing that prevents that.

I also think anyone who says levels should be perfectly navigable with no non-diegetic assistance 1) have almost never built a level before and 2) has never built a level in a context that necessitated actually shipping a game.

Games that don't use objective markers are often explicitly designed around that premise, and a ton of resources go into ensuring these systems don't need to be added. You'll see immersive sims thrown around a lot as an example of this, and that's because it's fundamentally part of that genre to be "immersive". You'll also notice that they're generally smaller, more focused bites of gameplay compared to the scale of other games, and these small spaces are iterated on way more frequently by way more people. They'll often have you exploring a single building or series of rooms in isolation rather than, say, a whole world. It's because there's SO MUCH work in making a world that directs you well without something explicitly guiding you, and even then these games will fail at it. The sheer amount of resources a Level Designer would need to execute that successfully for a wide number of players is staggering - I personally could never imagine building something without any non-diegetic UI and expecting it to "just work".

But hey, I'm just a Sr. Level Designer, what do I know. :)

As a case study: when I worked at Ubi I was on a project where one of our directors scrapped all the objective markers in the whole game, mid-production. Because the game wasn't fundamentally built for it from the ground up, and it was an open-world game with many objectives intricate enough to be distracting and demanding of the player's attention. It took a year for them to realize the scale and attention such a move would require simply wasn't available with the resources we had, and eventually we re-added all of them. Fun!

I also believe people use 'immersion' as a strawman to disingenuously attack design they simply don't like on the basis of it, and I see that happen a lot with stuff like non-diegetic UI markers.

I mean, to some players "immersion" is not having a HUD while playing, and to other players "immersion" is 'I want to have to press a button to breathe and blink and sleep for 8 hours in game to recover stamina'. Ask someone what makes a game "immersive" and you'll never get the same answer, and this is largely because "immersive" just depends on a player's values and what they like in a game. Therefore, I think it's just a fundamentally weak argument to imply that games shouldn't have markers at all, just because some people aren't "immersed" by them. I mean hell, half the games people tout for not having objective markers still have tons of non-diegetic UI. This is all just stuff I think stems from the wider cultural torrent that is ~video games~ though.

Anyway I'm rambling.

The fundamental idea here is that I think if you can put objective markers to assist you in guiding the player through your game, I think you should because no Level Design will ever be good enough. It's often cheap, easy to do, and frankly helps far more players than it hurts. I think it should be treated like an accessibility tool and control of it should be given to players to choose how much of it they want, where, etc. so that players who need the help get it, rather than have people campaigning to cut them out entirely from games and hoping the level design "just works".

Thanks for coming to my TED Talk :)

My hot take is that objective markers in video game UI is very good and that virtually every video game should have them, and that the pros vastly outweigh the cons.

#god this came out way longer than expected sorry sorry #I could ramble about this for forever lol #thoughts #blog #level design #game design #game dev #gamedev #indie dev #indiedev #game development #gamedevelopment

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astroismypassion · 2 years ago

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Mars sign: what gives you energy 🔥

Credit goes to my blog @astroismypassion

I want to do a self-care in astrology series. 🌿🌱

Today we are discussing Mars sign. It shows what (re)energizes you, gives you even more energy in your daily life.

You can try it out by viewing it as a tool or fuel to stay more focused in your day-to-day life and ready to take on new daily tasks.

🔥ARIES MARS🔥

do something for the first time

initiate a family gathering, friends gathering, host a party

learn more info, data about a topic you are passionate about

do a face mask/sheet mask

try outperforming someone😂 no, but hear me out, try to do/be better or work better than someone you admire or are inspired by, you thrive in competition

rearrange something in your home so that it gives you a feeling of newness

try an at-home workout

explore who you are, take those personality tests

sip a hot drink with your feet up

celebrate the small wins

build a pillow fort

go for a haircut

go for a bike ride

jump in puddles

🔥TAURUS MARS🔥

prepare someone or yourself a snack from natural ingredients (seasonal fruits, especially red, green and yellow fruits)

bake

put on perfume, deodorant

go to zumba or any dance class

literally go out and smell the roses, pleasant smelling flowers

order in food and do nothing all evening

sip and paint

draw and colour (or invest in a colour-book)

treat yourself to a fancy drink or make it yourself (like cocktail, premium hot chocolate etc.)

cook a special or a new meal

diffuse essential oils

light your favourite candle

tea time

wrap yourself in a blanket

create a morning and evening routine

🔥GEMINI MARS🔥

share information, talk more, teach a friend/sibling new facts, knowledge, information

watch an inspiring, informative YouTube video, a documentary

learn how to make cocktails

use public transportation and go to a city area you’ve never been before

journal, vent, talk about memories, emotions in a journal/notes app

play board games or cards

go to Escape room

make a blog and vent

watch an animated movie

practice breathwork

create a texting support group

have a staycation, but in your own town at a hotel

live your phone outside of bedroom at night

count things you are grateful for

🔥CANCER MARS🔥

spend more time with close friends, family members

take care of someone/something (an animal, plant, a sibling) and nurture them, feed them, prepare them a meal, a snack

host a picnic, barbecue, a dinner, lunch in your home

make a collage

write, listen to music, songs

make a monthly, themed music playlist

bake, prepare a home-cooked meal

make tea or iced tea

plan birthday, christmas gifts for family members or close friends

clean your room, kitchen, bathroom

make a bath, take a shower

make your own rage journal 😂 you know you want to cuss your loved one out without saying it to their face and hurt their feelings

play billiards

stargazing

cuddle someone, give them a hug

put on fresh sheets

ask for a hug

🔥LEO MARS🔥

rollerblade, go skating, skateboarding

send your crush a text/voice message/a photo

look at your previous acknowledgements, wins from tourments, medals and use them as a reminder that once you were already enough confident to do it

make home videos, literally make a movie for example about home-cooked meals for an interest you have

if you have a hobby or an interest in something (for example birds, WW2, astronomy, telescopes etc.) dedicate 20 min or less per day for that said hobby/interest

read about and learn how to have better posture, your back will be thankful

make a photo wall in your room

hype someone up by commenting on their photo or inspire/encourage a friend who needs it

dance in front of the mirror

take some cute selfies

🔥VIRGO MARS🔥

doodle, journal, draw no matter how not perfect you think it is

basically invest in your own hygiene throughout the day (use that body lotion, body scrub, lip balm, paint your nails, shave, wash your hair etc.), it will make you so renewed.

try to eat at least 2 different fruits or make sure to have a least one nutritious meal per day

STRETCH

bake an apple pie

DIY something

learn how to make non-alcoholic cocktail

go fruit picking

write a thank you note

write a ‘grateful for’ list

go cycling

go for a walk for 15 min and quickl come back

go for a quick walk, you walking faster

declutter something

read, invest in your to read list

go to the bookstore

eat a soup, drink fresh juice

answer your friends messages

send your friend a detailed, personal voice message

talk about your day and what you’ve already accomplished to a friend

watch animal videos

watch stand up comedy or a humoruous video

put on perfume, deodorant

try guided meditation

clean out your email inbox

🔥LIBRA MARS🔥

treat yourself to fine dining, a lovely meal in a nice restaurant with beautiful atmosphere

go to a concert, group gathering, social gathering with close friends

go for a drink with your bestie and just vent

organise your wardrobe for clothes

iron clothes, clean your shoes

put on an outfit you feel confident and beautiful in like get dressed up for no reason

do a guided meditation

put away your phone for set amount of time

picture collage

T-shirt craft

call someone you appreciated and like and tell them “I love you”

🔥SCORPIO MARS🔥

aaa LIQUIDS, you are probably not hydrated enough

more juices, but also tea or coffee, warm drinks, water, lemonade, iced tea will lift your spirits

mastrubate lol

go to Escape room

go on a night walk or stargazing

mooove your bodyyy

go on a solo date, take yourself on your dream date and do all the activities only you want to do

get a massage

get at least 8 hours of sleep

face your fears

put on lotion and pjs

invest in a silk pj

make a mug cake

🔥SAGITTARIUS MARS🔥

TRAVEL to gain clarity, perspective, change that scenery, even if this just means going into a forest, to the store, grabbing a coffee/tea

join a party

plan a vaction/day trip/weekend getaway

go on “a trip” to the mall

learn about airplanes and airports

try playing any ball sport

listen to inspirational stories/speeches

talk to a foreigner, someone on the internet/distant media

speak in a foreign language

go to a museum

video chat with someone

write a bucket list

🔥CAPRICORN MARS🔥

spend time with your parents, call your parents, grandparents

post something worthwhile on your social media platform

progress one step forward in a goal you are trying to achieve in one month

make 1 week, 6 weeks, 1 month, 1 year plans/visual

go in nature, to the nearest park, forest, on the hill

make a music playlist

go to a career centre

join that alumni club

inspire other with your story and how you overcame challenges before/in the past

plan your deadlines

plan your daily self care activities for the month

🔥AQUARIUS MARS🔥

do something spontaneous, what you consider odd, unconventional

travel in your mind or real life by watching videos about planets, space, electric vehicles, astrology and learn about thoss topics

make a comic

join a group gathering or iniciate one

talk about hopes, dreams, purpose with a friend

dabble into social activism

publish something on a platform, something that interest you

visit planetarium

visit a library

watch a webinar or a virtual workshop

listen to a TED talk

spend 10 min giving compliments on Instagram or any other social media

eat three nutritious meals

🔥PISCES MARS🔥

make visionboards in real life or on Pinterest

learn to listen more, more effectively and while someone is tell you a story, PICTURE it in your head

take photos of something you love

listen to music, dance

look at photo album on your phone or a real one

take a bath, a shower

go swimming

take a walk along a body of water

take yourself on a picnic in nature, by the water, park

read a book, kindle, a magazine, newspaper

buy artwork

make a freshed pressed fruit juice and drink it

write a thank you note to someone, a postcard, give them a small, thoughtful gift

watch stand up comedy

make a music playlist

garden, take care of plants

learn more about photography

visit a gallery, museum

watch an animated movie

help someone in need, be charitable, offer something to a homeless person

put more photos, artwork on your walls

learn about oceans, submarines, sea life, cruises, resorts, hotels

visit aquarium

watch reruns of your favourite sitcom

Credit goes to my blog @astroismypassion

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