#between cutscene and gameplay

[deadscell]

[mrnnki-img]

my sonic experience so far in a single image

[v-arbellanaris]

UR NOT INSANE EVEN THE UI LOOKS LIKE GOD OF WAR AJDJKSHDKSNDKDGH ik they listed it as one of their man inspirations but guys guys this feels a little too similar 👁️ idk if you’ve seen the warrior gameplay but there was a move that looked sooo much like using the blades of chaos i felt insane !! not but i can’t get over the ui 😭 like the first few pictures we got of it look just like gow’s menu in a purple gold font and i was like is anyone else seeing this. all the general slashing in gameplay and whatnot…very similar for sure

oh so they fr say it??? there were a few other features i felt were gow-ish as well, like the camera angles don't feel Typical of a rpg, the way you can only control your party members to let them make 1 or 2 actions (like atreus and freya as support charas), those little things suddenly diving in the sand, and the blight stuff that targets you & blows up during combat definitely felt familiar... and im like... ok gow was an amazing game, right, but what i personally really enjoyed about it was that the gameplay elements was not divorced from the narrative. is vg gonna go out of its way to justify these gameplay elements or are we just handwaving the entirely new mechanics by going 'ohhhh idk ghilain'nain i guess' lmfao.

[wolfiestars]

weird urge to play through thieves in time again even tho i know it will just make me angry >:(

[thatcrazycrowgirl]

I’m currently working my way through a game in another franchise, but I found myself getting a bit nostalgic and missing playing the AC ones; so here’s another little compilation from a previous Syndicate play session. A little hidden blade action, a little combat, cart hijacks, boat raids - you get the drill. Just another typical day in London, shaken up by a certain chaotic Frye twin. 😂

[misunderstandings-georg]

They should make a mech shooter for gamers who are bad at everything.

[kelbunny]

I love this man haha. Dragan my drunk beloved.

[rfoxlord]

me yesterday watching the metal gear solid movie

[rockeyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy]

people talk about hh and hb like they're writing blurbs for shitty books but trying to make them sound appealing. like okay it's a comedy and it's about "is everyone redeemable" and there are queer characters with problems. okay but is it good though? are the jokes still funny after you raise your standard of funny above a middle schooler's? does it actually do its plot instead of just having you watch characters do hijinks and kill each other and occasionally have a lore cutscene? are the troubled queers dynamic characters with underlying reasons and nuance for their behavior or are they family guy charaters

[pirdmystery]

this game is hard as fuck lmao

[poptartmochi]

i realized i have never shared mister man with y'all.... here are some agu screenies :]

[thebestpartofwakingup]

I wanna be more supportive of indie animation like the amazing digital circus but also have this unnerving feeling that if I highlight any aspects of it I dislike as a “learning example” for other artists as a whole I’m going to be like labeled a hater and bitch or whatever

[husband-steve-cortez]

But also when he gets mad he can do like. Jack level shit.

Glowing blue and running at an enemy screaming. Destruction and carnage in his wake.

I mean that's how he fights normally anyway - Annihilation field around him, running around throwing lances, biotic explosions happening all around him, combo after combo going off as he zips around, using backlash to defend and do damage as he approaches, hardly needing to fire his shotgun but when he does it's the fucking Dhan.

But it's different when he has a certain angry look in his eyes and he kicks it all up a notch, going from cute and stylish to absolutely terrifying.

[prokopetz]

The thing I like about the Blood Moon mechanic in Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom is how it affords game-mechanical transparency to the player.

Like, we all know the reason it exists is because, like any complex open-world game, BotW and TotK periodically need to hit the reset button on all non-trivial changes to the world state; in games that don't, your save file has unbounded growth due to the need to keep track of every little thing you've ever done, and eventually the system runs out of memory, save/load performance goes to shit, or both. It's basic software engineering constraints dictating the shape of play.

The thing is, most open world games try to do this subtly, perhaps by setting individual timers for the consequences of different actions to expire, or by linking world-state cleanup to proximity to the player character, but in practice it never works – trying to be sneaky about it paradoxically makes it more obtrusive to the player by rendering it opaque and unpredictable, often prompting the development of superstitious gameplay rituals to work around it.

BotW and TotK take precisely the opposite tack and make it 100% transparent and 100% predictable. Once a week, at exactly the same time of day, there's a spooky cutscene and an evil wizard undoes every change you've made to the world that doesn't have an associated quest log entry. Why everything at once, and always on the same schedule? A wizard did it. Why exactly and only those changes that don't have quest logs attached? See again: a wizard did it.

And this isn't just a gameplay conceit. Everybody knows about the evil wizard! The fact that the evil wizard keeps resetting everybody's efforts to fix the befuckening of the world is a central plot point. There are organisations whose chartered purpose is to go around redoing stuff that's been undone by the wizard.

It makes me wonder what other potential synergies between fantasy worldbuilding and mechanical transparency are going unexploited.

[suppermariobroth]

Relative size comparison between Paper Mario's graphics in the games in the Paper Mario series (and the related Mario & Luigi: Paper Jam).

From left to right: Paper Mario, Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door (GameCube), Super Paper Mario, Paper Mario: Sticker Star, Mario & Luigi: Paper Jam, Paper Mario: Color Splash, Paper Mario: The Origami King, and Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door (Nintendo Switch).

Note that while some of the games include different sizes of graphical assets for Mario (such as Paper Mario: The Origami King also including extra large versions for cutscenes), this compares specifically the size of the graphics used during regular gameplay.

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[equipment-manifest]

Curated list of Rain World analysis I like

The Ancients dragonpropaganda on popular misconceptions about the Ancients' culture ikayblythe's speculative biology kociamieta's notes on Ancient character design

Character analysis eliias-bouchard on NSH's portrayal ikayblythe on Pebbles' age and motivations pocket-goat's thoughts about Moon in the context of the Saint campaign shkika on Moon and Pebbles' relationship shkika on whether Moon and Pebbles are siblings skybristle's and my own thoughts on the decay of Moon's organic parts

General speculative biology chaotic-minds-think-alike's interpretation of lizards dragonpropaganda on the relationship of purposed organisms to ingame fauna flickering-nightfall's interpretation of the reproductive strategies and social structures of various species in the game sluglore on the intelligence of Slugcats and the experience of playing Rain World for the first time

Iterator anatomy bonniesband's exposition on the Rot as a type of cancer copepods and myself on whether parts of post-collapse Moon beyond the puppet could be conscious copepods on viewing iterators as more than the puppet delta-orionis' method for estimating the height of Iterator cans delta-orionis and myself discuss the meaning of the terms "Recursive Transform Array" and "Abstract Convergence Manifold" mebis-art-dump and I discuss the axon-like coral stems and other internal biota of Iterator superstructures my theory about how an Iterator's memories are stored and why Moon doesn't forget anything when she loses a neuron orangedoorhingeinstorage and kayjaypax on movable components in the memory conflux and adjacent systems skybristle's and my own thoughts on the decay of moon's organic parts

Iterator puppet anatomy aluminum-angels' interpretation bitsbug's puppet interpretation copepods' mechanical interpretation: moon & pebbles / post-collapse moon flickering-nightfall's journey to understand the puppet arm: part 1 / part 2 flickering-nightfall on the "umbilical" ikayblythe's arthropoidal interpretation: overview / endoskeletons / "skin" joowee-feftynn observes that puppets can't walk spotsupstuff on the relationship between puppet and can trashiiplant's ragdoll interpretation yellowsnacc's "jello-covered skeleton" interpretation

Slugcat anatomy arrayydee's slugcat design artihunter's take on the fur/slime question dopscratch's mollusk/mustelid interpretation honey-marrow's interpretation of Spearmaster's anatomy

Themes and storytelling bitsbug draws a comparison between Rain World's Cycle and the real-world Water Cycle comrade-slugcat and myself on themes of inevitability and futility in Monk & Survivor's campaigns dragonpropaganda on how Rain World's level design is based on the idea of civilizations successively building upon each others' ruins grunckle's theory relating ascension, void worms, and voidspawn together through the idea of qualia grunckle's illustration of the parallels between the iterators and void worms and some connections to Gnosticism nyuuronfly and vodens on the relationship between Rain World's lore and gameplay and the experience of a blind playthrough seventeendeer on the thematic significance of ascension and the player's agency in choosing it sick-ada's theory that the final cutscene in the Void sea leads back to the start of each vanilla campaign sluglore on the intelligence of Slugcats and the experience of playing Rain World for the first time Miscellaneous bitsbug and ikayblythe discuss the age of the ecosystem flecks-of-stardust's theory that (in vanilla) the Chimney Canopy pearl was created by Five Pebbles grunckle's notes on what we know about the cosmology of Rain World ikayblythe's speculative geology of the surface and void sea monkmain on the illustration for Stolen Enlightenment my theory on the meaning of "HR_LAYERS_OF_REALITY" my timeline of architecture on the surface rw-me elaborates on the canonicity of Downpour shkika on the distances between members of the local group shkika, flecks-of-stardust, and fluffybunny35 discuss why it rains in Shaded Citadel soaricarus, flickering-nightfall, and myself on why Seven Red Suns is probably not a member of the "local group" yunnifo discusses Rivulet ending projections