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anemo-writes · 4 years ago

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hello travelers! again, thank you for putting up with my inactivity, it’s been hard to write lately haha. anyways, i thought this would be something fun to post and for everyone to enjoy, whether you celebrate Valentine’s Day or not :) (note: this will probably be more fanon than canon so please bear with me, i’ll make it as canon as it can be :’) i also kept this pretty short, so hopefully that’s okay too,, and sorry for this being late haha—i wrote this very late at night so don’t mind any typos you find please)

much love,

~ anemo-chan <3

(The Playable) Genshin Impact Characters on Valentine’s Day (Romantically)

super romantic; gifts you a bouquet of flowers and takes you out to eat at a fancy restaurant/cooks for you.

Diluc

He is nervous. He’s never paid close attention to the countless amount of people who have lined outside the tavern to ask him to be their Valentine, only to be rejected. There was absolutely no way that he would turn to Kaeya for advice, so unfortunately this was something he would have to figure out for himself. He figures that it wouldn’t hurt to go traditional, so that’s what he does; he buys a large bouquet of roses (which he had to get from Donna, seeing that at the hours that he ended work were very late and Flora’s shop was not open at the time—yeah, that was not fun) and presents himself outside your doorway, to which he invites you to join him for a late dinner—which he makes!

Lisa

She leaves a letter on top of your nightstand, paired along with a singular rose. The letter states for you to meet her outside of Good Hunter, where you find her sitting at a table with a candle dimly-lighting up the surroundings. She greets you with a warm smile, gesturing for you to sit down—the two of you enjoy a candle-lit dinner as well as bolognese she specially requested for Sara to make for the two of you to enjoy together why does this remind me so much of Lady and the Tramp,,

Tartaglia

Oh boy. It’s always a fun time spending a holiday with him, seeing that it could go two ways; one, he would be too busy to celebrate it with you on the day of, and he would take you out the day after, or two—have a store’s entire line of merchandise presented to you outside your doorstep, in which a very, very smiley Tartaglia hidden within the pile (after all, he was the best present!) After you’re done moving all of the gifts into your house (it took up the space of your entire living room), he tells you to cover your eyes and follow him. He takes you to one of the most well-known restaurants in Liyue (which currently doesn’t have a name because it is very late here!), and insists that you order whatever you want, and however much you want.

Zhongli

Over the years, he’s witnessed many, many couples celebrate this holiday and every year he’s wished to do the same. He finds the perfect opportunity to do so when Valentine’s Day is around the corner, and boy does he plan it out for the two of you. He’s even made sure to have his wallet on him at all times—it would be extremely rude for you to have to pay if he happened to forget his wallet. He makes sure to stop by to pick up a bouquet of flowers, as well as a bottle of perfume (not in a bad way, just to clarify) from Ying’er’s shop that he recalled you liked. He makes sure to pick you up early from your work place to make sure you made it to your appointment on time; after all, being late to an appointment was similar to breaking a contract, no?

surprises you with homemade sweets.

Fischl

Oh, she is so nervous—of course, she doesn’t show this. The entire week, she spent researching recipes to create a special batch of chocolate-dipped strawberries just for you—she even sent Oz to the nearby farms to “borrow” the freshest strawberries for the treat (the farmers were too scared to confront the talking bird who “borrowed” their strawberries, so luckily they got away with it). She dips them in a purple-colored chocolate (because what other color would she use, really?) and drizzles on a dark-chocolate syrup to top it off. She’s too shy to actually give it to you herself though, so she has Oz drop it off for her.

Ganyu

Even though she’s quite busy, she’s somehow found time to whip up a special batch of chocolate just for you! She shapes them into Glaze Lilies (which she found quite hard, which is why there are so few of them) and presents them to you in a neatly-sealed box. She’s quite modest when your eyes widen and tell her it’s the best chocolate you have ever eaten, claiming that she only followed a recipe, when she really made it from scratch.

Keqing

Like Ganyu, you have no idea how she finds time to create a perfect array of chocolates, which she made herself! However, with her tightly-packed schedule, she has to drop it off at your house in advance, to which you accept happily. She tried to decorate them with designs of cartoon-versions of your faces, but they’re a bit...messy. Nonetheless, they’re tasty, and to her relief, you enjoy them.

Mona

Somehow, she’s managed to scrape up enough mora to buy you a necklace; yes, a necklace, and a real one at that—none of that fake, costume jewelry stuff! She even added a pendant shaped like star, just so you could be reminded of her whenever you fiddled with it or even glanced at it. She’s quite flustered when she gives it to you, ignoring the way you ask how she managed to save this much mora to be able to buy something like this, changing the subject on how you should never-ever take it off (because it looks great on you.)

Noelle

One word: pancakes. (Have you seen the ones she makes for her special dishes? They’re frigging amazing) As a dutiful maid should, she wakes up especially early to prepare a homemade breakfast just for you, to which she serves to you just as your wake up in bed. The fluffy stack of pancakes are decorated with fruits cut up in heart-shapes, as well the words, “Happy Valentine’s Day, Y/N”, written neatly with chocolate syrup—it’s quite a sight to see, to be honest, and utterly delicious. Lucky you!

Xiangling

The day before, she tells you to meet her at the restaurant around noon. When you arrive, the restaurant is adorned with Valentine decorations, as well as a terrifying amount of food; she insists that she only made it for you, so you better eat up! Before she can show you the other dishes, the restaurant is suddenly filled with a strong, bitter smell—something burning. With a yelp, she runs into the kitchen, coming out a few minutes later with a tray of half-scorched cupcakes, their Gouba-shapes adorned with...a lot of burn marks. Oh well, it’s the thought that counts, doesn’t it?

buys/makes a present for you.

Albedo

Without your knowledge, Albedo has been creating a collection of artworks throughout all the time you had spent together. The pieces include portraits of you, portraits of you and him (sucrose helped with this), as well as just random sketches of the little things that remind him of you, such as the bare, snowy-white terrain where the two of you first met, as well as its flora and fauna. If you request it, he’ll even make the painting come alive (literally), and the two of you run to Sucrose’s dwelling, who is very shocked to see the pair of you running from a Frosted Lawachurl when she peered out her window to see if she could pinpoint the sounds of distant screaming.

Amber

Is there anything better than a matching set of wind gliders? Not only that—they were homemade! She spent the last couple of weeks putting together a pair of gliders for the two of you, customizing them to your tastes (which she nailed!) She quite literally drags you to the nearest hill to test them out, and the two of you end up challenging each other on who can get back to the Knights of Farvonius Headquarters the fastest—spoiler alert: she did.

Barbara

Oh, she would make the cutest card for you—the envelope is decorated with cute stickers (some of them even had her face on it; there’s nothing like promoting merchandise, am i right? jkjks) She also pairs it off with a box of chocolates that she bought from Sara—however, what she didn’t know was that in the box was a special-edition spicy chocolate truffle. With your luck, that was the first one you chose—and boy, were you met a surprise (it was so bad that you were begging Barbara to use her Vision on you, which she refused of course). Fun times.

Chongyun

He’s real sweet. After his expeditions and commissions, he opens the freezer (yes he keeps them in there, don’t judge him) to an array of ice sculptures, shapes varying from flowers, hearts, and such—although it’s quite the simple gift, he’s put a lot of effort into them, even putting in the extra effort to cast a spell to make sure they would not melt; it’s all worth though, when he sees the absolutely giddy expression on your face, and the look of pure awe as you pick one up and study it closely, admiring all of the details and work that’s he put in.

Ningguang

She sends out informants to find out what you like, whether it be something that your gaze settled on for too long or something you’ve mentioned while talking to her—on the day of, you open your door to a mountain of gifts, with Ningguang herself peering out from behind it with a calm smile and a wave (which was the opposite of your reaction, because who has that much mora to purchase all of these gifts?!?)

Razor

He doesn’t have a clue on what the holiday until Lisa asks him if he’s planned something for the two of you during one of his lessons. When he shakes his head no, Lisa suggests that he make you something, to which he sets out on an adventure to do, looking for flowers and flower stems to weave into a pair of matching bracelets—they’re not the prettiest, but he is pretty proud of it; after all, it was his first time making something like that. He’s quite nervous to present it to you, afraid that you might not like it, but all feelings of worry melt away when you slide it on with a huge smile on your face, insisting that he wears his too.

Sucrose

At first, she considers gifting you a present that she created herself; of course, with her work being alchemy, she isn’t sure if that would be the safest option, despite being talented herself. And so, she resorts to buying a present for you—she is very picky with the present though, insisting that it should be perfect since she could not make one herself. She even consults Albedo when selecting some of the presents (he doesn’t help her unfortunately; he believes that she should figure it out herself haha). Like Razor, she’s quite nervous to give it to you, but lets out a huge sigh of relief as you thank her happily for the gift, wiping a bead of sweat from across her forehead (sucrose bby anything you give us would be perfect,,)

whisks you away somewhere sentimental, where the two of you can enjoy a special date.

Beidou

It’s ungodly early in the morning when Beidou presents herself in front of your doorstep, announcing that you’ll be joining her and the crew on a special ride. She tugs you along beside her until you reach the harbor, where you are met with the sight of her ship adorned with streamers and banners, varying between shades of pink and red. Onboard, there is a table filled with goodies the crew collected and made, and boy do they look delicious. The group sets out to sea, and you take your place next to the captain, who even lets you steer the boat (momentarily, at least.)

Bennett

He takes you to meet his dads; yes, yes—he knows that it’s not the most romantic thing to do on a day dedicated to lovers, but he figures it’s just as important. Besides, they’ve been asking about you for quite a while—they even set up a small party within the Adventurer’s Guild, with the help of Bennett, of course. You spend the day listening to their old adventuring stories, as well as bits from Bennett’s childhood (poor boy is flustered from all the information his dads are spilling, but he’s still happy either way; after all, he’s with the most important people to him.)

Kaeya

He quite literally kidnaps you; one second you’re walking in the streets of Mondstadt on your way to work when suddenly someone grabs you by the waist and pulls you into an alley way (that sounds so creepy but i swear he means it in a good way). He only chuckles and shields himself with his arms as you punch him lightly, retorting that he scared you. He doesn’t care that the two of you have an overwhelming amount of work to do—after all, Valentine’s Day only comes once a year, right? Surprisingly, he doesn’t take you the tavern, but instead...Dawn Winery! Diluc received quite the surprise when he is met with the two of you standing outside his gates, with Kaeya requesting a wine/grape juice taste-testing. Yeah...you guys didn’t get any of that, but you did manage to snag a couple of grapes on your way out! Good for you!

Venti

You wake up in your bed, opening your eyes to see a very-smiley Venti laying beside you, chin propped up against his hand as he watches you yawn sleepily as you force yourself out of bed. You’re then presented with a handpicked-bouquet of Ceceilias, the freshest of the bunch, if he may add. You barely have time to thank him before he hoists you up in his arms and out of your dwelling, gliding over the city of Mondstadt as he whisks you away to Starsnatch Cliff, where he’s prepared a special performance just for you (and no, you don’t need to pay.)

Xingqiu

While he’s not the most romantic, he does have a clue on what people look for on Valentine’s Day; after all, that’s what cheesy-romance novels were for, right? Unbeknownst to you, he takes you on a date very similar to the one the main characters in his favorite novels partook in—and you don’t find out until you catch him peeking into the pages while you weren’t (you were) looking. Again, it’s the thought that counts—

doesn’t celebrate Valentine’s Day.

Jean

Sadly, she probably forgets about the holiday. She’s too busy holed-up in her office to notice the couples gathered up in the courtyard, sharing moments with their lover. It’s not until she walks out to take a breather that she notices the commotion—she immediately calls you over, apologizing frantically. Of course, to this you respond that’s it’s okay, but that you would much rather her take the rest of the day off to spend time together, to which she reluctantly agrees.

Xiao

“I do not have time to celebrate silly human traditions like that.” He would say as you bound up to him, exclaiming that it’s Valentine’s Day, the day where you can give sweets to your loved ones, and asking if he had someone special in mind to spend it with. He’s irked when your gaze falters and the grip on the object you’re hiding behind your back tightens—he only grows more irked as you mutter to yourself how you’ll give the chocolates you made to someone else. He scoffs loudly, avoiding your gaze as he lays out his hand in front of you to accept the chocolates (just because he doesn’t celebrate the holiday doesn’t mean he can’t get jealous!)

#anemo-writes #genshin impact x reader #genshin x reader #genshin impact #genshin impact scenarios #genshin impact imagines #THE WAY THIS IS A DAY LATE #can you tell that i’ve never written for zhongli before :’)#bennett’s is my favorite i almost cried while writing it because it was so wholesome #diluc x reader #Childe x reader #zhongli x reader #chongyun x reader #razor x reader

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another-rogue-trevelyan · 4 years ago

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If you liked Dragon Age Masterlist

If you’re anything like me, you’re into niche market, high fantasy, single player RPGs, preferably with a historical setting and romance options. So if you’re looking for a new game, here I am with some suggestions!

Sorted by studio:

Bethesda:

Oblivion (2006)

“In the shadow of evil, a hero will rise from the ashes of a fallen empire. The gates have been opened, and the battle has begun. Only one thing can save the world from Mehrunes Dagon and the demonic hordes of Oblivion. The true heir of the Septim line must be found and restored to the Imperial throne. The fate of the world rests in the hands of one. Find him, and shut the jaws of Oblivion.”

The Elder Scrolls series were my gateway into RPGs and hold a special place in my heart. Oblivion features a wide open world, immersive combat, and the ability to customize race, class, and gender.

Skyrim (2011)

“The Empire of Tamriel is on the edge. The High King of Skyrim has been murdered. Alliances form as claims to the throne are made. In the midst of this conflict, a far more dangerous, ancient evil is awakened. Dragons, long lost to the passages of the Elder Scrolls, have returned to Tamriel. The future of Skyrim, even the Empire itself, hangs in the balance as they wait for the prophesized Dragonborn to come; a hero born with the power of The Voice, and the only one who can stand amongst the dragons.”

I have sunk so many hours into this game and still have not experienced all there is to experience. Just like Oblivion, Skyrim offers the ability to customize your character and find a play style that suits you. A huge open world offers tons of opportunity for exploration and questing. You could play this game many, many hours and not even touch the main quest if you wanted to.

BioWare:

Mass Effect Legendary Edition (2021)

Just do it. Just fucking do it I’m still sobbing I’ve never had a game wreck me in this way. I might possibly like it more than Dragon Age which feels sacrilegious to say but it was so good. You follow Commander Shepard (customizable) for three whole games and the choices have serious consequences. Also, romance. Truthfully this might be the most well written storyline I’ve ever seen in a video game. Also, same studio as Dragon Age.

CD Projekt:

The Witcher III: Wild Hunt (2015)

I’ll let the website description speak for itself, but Witcher III was good enough that I didn’t mind being forced to play as a man (those who know me know that I exclusively prefer to play women and often dislike games where I can’t do so)! The characters that make up this story are captivating and suck you into their world, leaving you with some tough choices to make. Also, bonus points for romance! (Yen is one of my all time favorite characters, Triss never stood a chance for me. Sorry Triss fans 😂)

Larian:

Divinity Original Sin 2 (2017)

“The Divine is dead. The Void approaches. And the powers lying dormant within you are soon to awaken. Choose your role in a BAFTA-winning story, and explore a world that reacts to who you are, and the choices you make. With five races to choose from, and an adventure playable solo or as a party of up to four, lay waste to an oppressive order in a world afraid of magic. Become the God the world so desperately needs.”

Full disclosure, I have not finished playing this one yet and will update when I do, but what I’ve played so far has been great! A classic, turn-based RPG that allows you a wide range of character customization. I find this game incredibly satisfying to be a rogue (my preferred class) because it lets me live my dream of throwing knives at people. Also, romance!

Baldur’s Gate III beta (2020)

“An ancient evil has returned to Baldur's Gate, intent on devouring it from the inside out. The fate of Faerûn lies in your hands. Alone, you may resist. But together, you can overcome. Gather your party.”

Fair warning, as of my most recent update to this post (March 30th, 2021) this game is still in a beta phase, which means it is NOT complete and has aspects that are missing, glitchy, or subject to change. With that being said, I’m so obsessed. It’s so, so good already and is only getting better. Another wide open world to explore with a group of companions with strong and sometimes clashing personalities, choices are abundant in this game and will affect how your party members think of you. This game so far gives me the feeling that choices are complicated and aren’t always easy to tell which is morally right, which I personally love. Also, I can be a sarcastic ass with a good heart, which is always fun. Astarion basically owns me now, but if you can resist him there are plentiful other romance choices as well! Customization is already a wider range than I’ve seen in most RPGs and they haven’t even finished the character creator yet, which has me SO excited for the finished product. Also - good hair?!??!! I love it!

Lionhead:

Fable III (2010)

“Lead a revolution to take control of Albion, fight alongside your people, and experience love and loss while preparing to defend the kingdom against a looming threat. Your choices as ruler will lead to consequences felt across the entire land.”

I’ll be honest, this one isn’t my favorite on the list, but was good enough to still make it! This game allows you to choose between playing as the prince or the princess on a quest to save your kingdom from itself, and then a greater threat as well. The game takes place in a kingdom loosely modeled after industrial England, and what did score it some major points were (SPOILER WARNING - skip the purple if you don’t want to know!) that the last act of the game lets you play as the monarch, where you are forced to make some tough decisions in order to save your kingdom. It is very easy to back yourself into a corner, pinch pennies in order to fund the army and save the kingdom, but make your citizens hate you because of it. You’re gonna have to be very, very careful, which is something I did really enjoy about this game. (I’ve heard Fable II was better, and that’s also on my list to try, will update in the future!)

Nintendo:

Fire Emblem Three Houses (2019)

“War is coming to the continent of Fódlan. Here, order is maintained by the Church of Seiros, which hosts the prestigious Officer’s Academy within its headquarters. You are invited to teach one of its three mighty houses, each comprised of students brimming with personality and represented by a royal from one of three territories. As their professor, you must lead your students in their academic lives and in turn-based, tactical RPG battles wrought with strategic, new twists to overcome. Which house, and which path, will you choose?”

Currently playing this one and I’m so addicted! This one is slightly outside of my usual taste but it has made me interested in playing more games like it. The player controls Byleth (you can rename them if you wish), who becomes a professor of combat and battle tactics despite their young age at a monastery and finds themself in charge of a house of students. Battles are tactics and strategy based and classes are highly customizable. I sunk like 30 hours into this game in the last three days. I won’t say more about the plot to avoid spoilers, but it’s been a ton of fun and also has slow burn romance

Spiders:

Greedfall (2019)

This game destroyed my soul in the best way and when I finished it I immediately started a new game to play it again. You play as Lady or Lord De Sardet, Legate of the Congregation of Merchants and effectively the right hand of your cousin, who has been appointed governor of your new colony on the island. While I enjoy the combat in this game, which allows you the choice between one handed, two handed, magic, and pistols or rifles (save that ammo for when you really need it!), this game focuses heavily on diplomacy and relations. Be careful what information you give to whom and how you treat every decision. The enemies you make early on might be people you need on your side later. I also love that choices aren’t always clearly right or wrong, and often are more complicated than they first appear. Even the best intentions can sometimes go awry.

Ubisoft:

Assassin’s Creed, Syndicate (2015)

“London, 1868. In the heart of the Industrial Revolution, lead your underworld organization and grow your influence to fight those who exploit the less privileged in the name of progress”

Another one that I’ll admit, I haven’t finished, and is definitely the odd one out on the list because it’s set in Victorian England, but I was having fun with what I had played so far before Greedfall distracted me. In this game, you alternate between controlling twins Jacob and Evie Frye as you explore and liberate London while meeting famous historical figures and running a gang on the side.

Assassin’s Creed, Origins (2017)

“Ancient Egypt, a land of majesty and intrigue, is disappearing in a ruthless fight for power. Unveil dark secrets and forgotten myths as you go back to the one founding moment: The Origins of the Assassin’s Brotherhood.”

In the spirit of honesty, I haven’t started this one yet, but I am so confident that I’m gonna love it when I do that it’s here anyway. I’ve purchased it, and will get to it soon, I swear! In the meantime, I wanted to put it here because I’m confident some of you will enjoy it. Will come back with a review once I know more.

Assassin’s Creed, Odyssey (2018)

“Write your own epic odyssey and become a legendary Spartan hero in Assassin’s Creed® Odyssey, an inspiring adventure where you must forge your destiny and define your own path in a world on the brink of tearing itself apart. Influence how history unfolds as you experience a rich and ever-changing world shaped by your decisions.”

Y’all this game owned my soul for a while. I’ve sunk so many hours into it. You have a choice to play as either Kassandra or Alexios and navigate the wonders of Ancient Greece. The world is stunning, the choices are important, and this game took a big step for the assassins creed series in becoming a true RPG. I can’t recommend this one enough, you should absolutely go for it!

Assassin’s Creed, Valhalla (2020)

“Become Eivor, a legendary Viking warrior. Explore England's Dark Ages as you raid your enemies, grow your settlement, and build your political power in the quest to earn a place among the gods in Valhalla.”

This game is brand new, hot off the press, and has already been a massive hit. I have only JUST started playing it and am about an hour in, but so far so good! It’s here on my recommendations list because of its wild popularity and because I’ve already enjoyed other games in this series, so I feel confident that some of my fellow dragon age fans will enjoy it. Will update again once I get further in.

Other games on my To Be Played list (otherwise known as things I don’t want to recommend because I know almost nothing about them but will update here after I know more)

-Pillars of Eternity 1 and 2

-Horizon Zero Dawn

-Assassin’s Creed: Black Flag

-Fable 1 and 2

-Kingdoms of Amalur

-Breath of the Wild

-Crimson Desert (not out yet but I’m intrigued)

#will update as I find more #if you liked dragon age #dragon age #video games #video game recommendations #op #rpgs #masterlist

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doctor-roman · 4 years ago

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Hey I don't know if a post had been made about it but I wasn't able to find it if it was. Either way I was just wondering (if you're willing to share) what turned you off of mtg so hard?

In order, it was:

-Avacyn getting killed. No, seriously, Avacyn and Innistrad were a big part of what got me into the game as a whole. It didn’t outright kill my interest in the game at first, but it was definitely the first step on that slope.

-The end of Magic’s in house story team and the passing of that job off to outside authors who tend to know nothing about it.

-War of the Spark, and its back pedaling of Chandra’s bisexuality. I wasn’t even a fan of Gruulfriends to begin with (was more of a Julaar fan myself), but even I can say that that was just scummy.

-War of the Spark: Forsaken and realizing Wizards really just does not give a shit about its own franchise’s lore anymore. A decade of story just thrown in the trash and lit on fire. Every single character came away from that story worse than how they started, and I have no confidence that Wizards will ever re-reach what it had from Khans to Ixalan.

-Brandon Sanderson writing on his own time what was supposed to be a free novella (Children of the Nameless), and Wizards then taking down the free link so they can sell it as an e-book. Even Sanderson was pretty pissed about it last I heard.

-Pumping Simic with so much value that it almost feels stupid to play anything else. Remember; Oko and Uro were supposed to be playable in the same standard environment. Or, in a broader sense, just the sheer amount of power creep that’s taken place these past few years.

-Wizards focus on Arena and letting it dictate how they design cards rather than it being a table top game first and foremost. I remember during Ikoria season a card getting spoiled that gained a keyword counter at random but only keyword counters that it didn’t already have. I remember reading that card and trying to figure out “how does a person even go about figuring that out?” before realizing “oh yeah, the Arena RNG is just supposed to do that for you”.

-Inconsistency with its reprint policy. A few folks at Wizards have gone on record to say they “don’t want to reprint fetchlands because all of that shuffling slows the game down”. And then they print Fabled Passage and Prismatic Vista which do literally that. Like...come on, Wizards. (What’s worse is that I’ve heard rumors that fetch lands are lined up to come out in Zendikar collector boosters. Which, if true, is just...so god damned scummy in its own right.)

-“This isn’t for you”, aka, product fatigue. It started with Secret Lairs. Cats, Serum Visions, Thalia, Godzilla lands. At first, none of them appealed to me, and I just shrugged it off as “well, yeah, that’s just not my thing”. But over time, as Jumpstart came out, then Double Masters, I started to wonder when Wizards would start making something for me. It’s just been product after product and none of it excites me because it’s all fed through the pipeline, one after another, with none of those products getting a chance to stand out. Christ, it seemed like I was finding spoilers for something every day for two months straight on the Magic subreddit, and after a while I just became completely desensitized to it.

And the worst part? This isn’t even everything. There were so many tangents that I was willing to go down as I was writing all this, but forgot because I had so many other things to cover. And it sucks, because I look back on the time that I was more heavily involved with Magic really fondly.

I miss discussing the weekly stories that got published for each new set. I miss coming up with characters and figuring out how they interact with my friend’s characters (some of my current best friendships started out this way!!!). God, there was a time where I was trying to get everyone I knew and their mother into Magic. But now those days feel so long ago.

Flat out, Magic does not care about making a fun, engaging game anymore. It’s devolved into “just make whatever gets us more money”.

#I might not have articulated all of this well because im tired and about to go to bed #but just #fuck man #I dont miss Magic #so much as I miss what Magic used to be

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glowyjellyfish · 3 years ago

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Progress report:

I downloaded many medieval things from many sites. Still need to install most of them. The big problem was attempting to download literally everything from Almighty Hat--I was planning to mainly just go for objects at this point, but there was so. much. hair. and medieval undergarments! different ones from the other Almighty Hat ones I already had! ...so eventually I bookmarked the hair pages I thought I didn’t have, and promised myself to do a hair run later. That means it feels like I only have PBK left to scour for objects, without counting things like GOS gift sets as I don’t even know how to begin searching through that without literally looking at everything.

The CEP seemed to solve the blue on the medieval wood set... until I loaded a lot where I had already placed them. Then the blue was back, would not depart, and any new attempts at placing also came with blue. This is after emptying my cache AND clearing all the thumbnails, you understand. I guess placing the blue objects was a bad idea as now the lots have re-cursed the objects with blue? Should I just sell and replace the cursed objects with different ones, or do I need to do another re-download, or what? I will have to see.

Anyway, today I built a beekeeping farm for the Patels that turned out pretty great. Try as I might, I could not make the lot be worth $35,000 as yeoman lots should be, but it’s fine. There’s only so much decor I could cram in there anyway.

I forgot to position the camera correctly to see the ceiling, but trust me it has one. Oh, probably I left the game set on an upper floor after taking the outside picture. Mea culpa!

Bush clipping in from outside, might have to deal with that. I found I like clustering the fridge, sink, and tub next to each other in my medieval kitchens in an effort to imply that they are sharing a small water supply rather than having the whole house full of plumbing wherever.

Second floor! I have finally figured out to put roof walls above interior walls. This room is currently a vague nursery, and has loads of space for more children as needed.

The bed looks a little overly fancy, but it wasn’t expensive. I’m just going to pretend a relative carved it all nice for them.

The yard! Little outhouse, five beehives ready to be filled, a honey press, four apple trees and one each pear and persimmon for variety, and a row of blackberry bushes.

Rows of herbs and berry bushes, and in the distance a slightly overgrown cluster of shrubs and wildflowers for the bees to enjoy!

Looking back at the house from within a patch of wildflowers.

And a small market stand out front to sell their herbs, fruit, and honey. Maybe someday, they’ll add a fully indoor home store to sell out of, but right now I love this house too much to change it. It’s that glamorous yellow plaster-and-timber exterior, I am sure. I’m a little concerned I made it too nice for yeomen, but it has the correct number of rooms and furniture (plus some decor and one extra side table for the scroll phone), and they didn’t even fill out the standard pre-garden yeomen budget of $35,000, so it’s probably fine.

And I am getting very close to finishing the makeovers of Desiderata Valley, after which will be everyone’s favorite, Pleasantview!

The second yeoman family of Desiderata Valley, after the Ottomases, is the Jocque family.

Sophia Jocque. I try to match the colors of each sim’s original outfit unless I find something else I like better, and I made a point of giving her long, soft hair to counteract her very square jaw. I think she came out looking really nice!

Marcel Jocque. Nothing special, but I’ve been trying that hair on lots of men and am pleased I finally found one for whom it worked!

Violet Jocque, now with one long braid instead of two short ones!

Next we have the Bells, the only merchant family of Desiderata Valley.

Hannah Bell. Although I usually vaguely aim in the direction of whatever texture a sim’s original hair is, in this case I didn’t think it was particularly sensible to give Hannah and Sharon straight hair. No straighteners in the medieval megahood! Besides, she looks much nicer with those braids.

...and Sharon looks amazing with this short curly mop. She’s a tad rebellious anyway, and I didn’t want to repeat my longer curly hairs this early.

Isaac Bell. It was kinda tough finding him an outfit that reflected his colors without being too high or low class, and without simply repeating what I’ve put on other yeomen. As you can see, I didn’t quite nail it (his original outfit is pink and grey), but this works; he looks like he’s got a bucket of charisma.

And Daniel Bell, sneaking in one last use of the TV before everything goes full medieval.

Finally, the gentry of Desiderata Valley, Lady Natasha Una.

...she’s still obsessed with grilled cheese. I might change that, but then again I might not. She’s one of the highest ranking available adult women, so she probably won’t stay single for long. Her best prospects are currently Duke Armand DeBateau, Lord Nervous Subject/Specter (I’ll probably change his last name to Specter, Subject is his... hostage name), or, failing either of those, Lord Geoff Rutherford, Lord Connor Weir, Lord Kent Capp, or Lord Frances J. Worthington III. Kent Capp is less likely, as I want to prioritize him for ladies that need to keep their names and positions, but he’s definitely an option, and they have hit it off before in other, non-medieval megahoods I’ve played.

I just have to makeover the Aspir family, and then I’ll be on to the peasants of Pleasantview. Also, I have decided that I need to finish making over all the playable sims (including the college sims) before I can start actually playing, in addition to completing all lot construction and remodeling in Belladonna Cove. I... am not sure yet whether it’s a great or terrible idea to start actually playing before I finish Everything, but it at least makes a nice smaller goal to shoot for.

#the sims 2 #ts2 #sims 2 medieval #the megakingdom of simland #simblr

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gascon-en-exil · 5 years ago

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Mercilessly Judging the Men of Fòdlan: The Empire

It’s been a long time coming, over eight months in fact, but now that it may be assumed that the last of the DLC has been released and the fandom as a whole has settled comfortably into its various camps I think there’s no better time than now to answer that burning question: how raunchily, outrageously gay can the male cast of Three Houses possibly be? For those unfamiliar with this fun little series of mine, I’ve been applying my extensive knowledge and experience of gay male sex and hookup culture to the men of Fire Emblem, originally as a way of reckoning with the refusal of the games themselves to provide me with any worthwhile self-insert M/M content. I stand by that premise for FE16 - you all know how absolutely nothing appeals to me about m!Byleth or his prospects on that score - but in the years since my first outing of merciless judgment with Awakening that idea has expanded into something broader, an imaginative modern AU of sorts where all these guys are into men (if not always exclusively) and willing to put themselves out there in the lewd and semi-anonymous world of hookup apps in search of their preferred carnal delights.

A note on organization before we begin, as this material is too long to cram into one post. Excluding Byleth (as Avatars and their spawn always are for this project) there are twenty-one playable male characters in Three Houses. This makes for an even threeway division to preserve the eponymous conceit of the game, but not a particularly neat one. Aligned with the Adrestian Empire I therefore have below the male Eagles, Crimson Flower-exclusive Jeritza, former Imperial noble Hanneman, and...Seteth, because he’s the closest thing to a non-self-insert lord figure in Silver Snow and because he had to end up somewhere. As I said, not very neat.

The Kingdom

The Alliance

Hubert

His profile is sparsely filled out and his photo less than promising, but the select few who catch his eye will be treated to a courteous (if mildly acidic) barrage of introductory messages and polite requests to meet over coffee or a light lunch, no dick pics or requests for same in sight. It’s only after the exchange of small talk has passed that someone - could be you, could be him - brings up why he has kink as a listed interest, opening up a Pandora’s box of horrors as he casually shows you some of his photo collections. Asses red from whips and floggers, scrotums stuck through with pins, barbed cock rings, electrified nipple clamps, and ghastly shots of the man himself, his mouth dripping with blood over a fresh bite wound on his teary-eyed partner’s shoulder. He is, he explains, a Dom at heart - and the rougher the better. What he doesn’t explain and likely never will is that all that pain play and torture porn neatly covers for the fact that he’s less endowed and less skilled in that area than he’d be willing to admit, or that he harbors a secret longing to be Dommed himself, probably by someone close to him who has no interest whatsoever. He takes his career very seriously although you’ll never learn exactly what that entails, but you have a sneaking suspicion that whatever it is enables all those coldly violent impulses he displays in the bedroom.

Favorite erotic tea time subjects: CBT, vore, femdom

Favored gift: stiletto heels, for use on his face

Ferdinand

Within a minute of talking to him you know his full name, what prominent public figure(s) he’s related to, and where he plans on going with his life, in an overwhelming display of lack of concern for keeping his private life private that would be worrying if he didn’t pair it with an indefatigable self-confidence. The type of gentleman who expects flowers and opened doors and one person to pay for a whole date and coy blushing about going back to his place for some tea, but what unfolds afterwards may be surprising to anyone who wasn’t picking up on the subtext during the night out: that you’re dealing with a toned and vigorous vers/bottom who longs to lie back and be taken care of but absolutely will never turn down a challenge or request no matter how much it demands of him or how expertly he will be able to rise to the occasion. Long practice and some truly enviable thighs (he’s a noted equestrian, and loves showing off his album of favorite horses) let him milk a cock for hours - nearly as long as the subsequent pillow talk will be. It’s little wonder more than one of his lovers has had the idea to gag him...or to fuck him somewhere outside his bedroom once they go in and find the walls plastered with posters of his favorite pop and stage divas staring at you. Prime trophy husband material, wealthy and well-connected and fetching on anyone’s arm, but there’s no question that he’ll only be truly happy if he’s with someone who can challenge him to step out of his unusually large comfort zone: socially, professionally, or sexually.

Favored erotic tea time subjects: edging, crossdressing, fisting

Favored gift: a horse cock dildo, for his much-lauded huge hole

Linhardt

A master at genuinely negligent ghosting, it’ll take a minor miracle to actually arrange a meeting with this guy. Either he never answers, or he does but only to snap at you because he’s busy and only even logged into the app because his mind wandered for a second. Still, he draws a lot of attention from those into geeky twinks. Is not into foreplay, and can scarcely be bothered to maintain interest long enough to even stay hard unless you get lucky enough to hit on one of his subjects of recent fascination. Never offers to do anything in bed, and will in fact pick up his phone to browse through Wikipedia and Reddit while he’s being penetrated. Calling him out for his appalling lack of manners will get nothing more than a wry snort and a quick summary of whatever’s currently got his attention. Never cums, doesn’t seem to want to cum, and guys creative enough to try to ride him are often disappointed that he’s more likely to grumble that all that bouncing on his pelvis is making it impossible for him to catch a power nap. Just about the only way to fully get him invested is to get really weird - introduce him to some fetish he’s never thought to try. Incest kink, breeding kink, role reversals, elaborate roleplay...the more cerebral the better, because the physical stuff tends to put him off (especially blood play, which is his hard limit). Needless to say most aren’t up to that task, and so he’s nonchalantly left a trail of frustrated and disappointed men in his wake.

Favored erotic tea time subjects: somnophilia, historical roleplay, mpreg

Favored gift: a long-lasting vibrator, so he can stick it in and let it work while he’s otherwise occupied

Caspar

No amount of headless torso pics and carefully scaled dick pics will be enough for his ego, but encountering him in person will reveal that he’s not so much vain or delusional masc4masc as really, really compensating for something. This manifests as a deep-rooted resentment against guys taller than him or, ahem, better-proportioned, but his preference of sexual partners does not reflect his prejudices - which is fortunate for him given his measurements. Loud and energetic in all things, and it shocks no one that he’s a screamer in bed but also can’t last for very long once he really gets going. Lucky for everyone that his refractory period is unusually brief, although that leaves him deflecting odd inquiries into whatever substances he may be on (he’s clean and always has been, hard as that is for anyone to believe). Likes to top for the workout, but he won’t say no to riding a good dick. Has an unexpected sentimental side he’s not very good at expressing except indirectly, in the same way that he’s apparently oblivious to his casual innuendos. It will take someone very patient to put up with him, but the reward is (probably) worth it for the body alone provided he’s got a sufficient outlet for all that energy. Would be perfect for an active poly relationship or long-term FWB situation so no one guy has to manage him alone, but he’d have to be at the center of any such arrangement lest his numerous insecurities rear their heads. Is not into incest kink.

Favored erotic tea time subjects: post-workout sex, multiple orgasms, autofellatio (he wishes)

Favored gift: condoms a size too big for him, because even safe sex should be an opportunity for bragging

Seteth

He doesn’t share nudes, and says upfront that he’ll block anyone who asks or opens conversation with one. Seems to be genuinely interested in friendship over anything else, although he’s not great at small talk in text and would rather chat over snacks on a park bench or at one of the numerous community events he likes to organize. Is a family man through and through: devoted to his loved ones, quiet in his hobbies, and unusually spiritual in an orthodox church-going way. You start to wonder if he’s even into men or if his presence on the apps was just a very strange fluke, but he holds his handshakes just a little too long and progresses quicker to hugs and quietly intimate arm touches. Discussion of his prior love life is strictly off limits, but many months down the road when you finally get invited into his bed it’s clear that he’s no blushing virgin and is adept in the use of fingers, tongue, and cock for fully satisfying his partner. He might even bottom, although he’ll blush about being long out of practice in that area which suggests a wealth of untold stories by itself. He also may be, somehow, the only man in existence who knows what intercrural is and how to do it. Blessed with stamina far beyond what might be suggested by his age (which he only reveals several weeks into your acquaintance, another point of embarrassment for him), your encounters are far more likely to end with a phone call from one of the innumerable people who look up to him and depend upon his reliable if fussy sense of duty than it is from him tiring out. Fond of fishing, and known to take dates out to cast a line and then maybe have some naughty fun afterward. Does not appreciate being called a daddy, but he’s been known to accept big bro as an occasional slip-up.

Favored erotic tea time subjects: discipline, incest kink, scalies

Favored gift: your STI testing history, because he doesn’t mess around with that stuff

Hanneman

A polite if unassuming silver daddy, with no sugar for the obvious escorts but the cushy professional post and generosity to make him appealing to a less openly mercantile sort of young man. His chosen field is not an easy subject for light conversation, but damned if he doesn’t try his best regardless. His favorite tactic might be finding some way of applying his work to something about his date, no matter how tenuous the connection or how unwelcome the observations. Not super fit and doesn’t get out much so as the night is winding down he’s not good for very much other than intermittent blowjobs and even more languid handjobs, although a truly dedicated partner might coax something more out of him with help from a little blue pill or two...and maybe some poppers, because he’s old enough to remember when everyone used those. Despite his reputation for mildly inappropriate perving on guys young enough to be his sons - some of which he acquired in a professional context, with some of his favorite anecdotes of past trysts involving junior lab techs/TAs/secretaries/others among his subordinates - he’s not actually averse to fooling around with men closer to his own age, although he’s more awkward about it since he’s a bit out of his element when he’s no longer the only experienced voice of wisdom in the room. Either way, if there’s one thing he hates it’s sloppiness, whether in one’s personal or professional life. As a result he avoids bars like the plague and has little patience for drunks. Contrary to this fastidiousness however his advances in his career are such that he may one day do something radical and ill-advised in the pursuit of knowledge; one only hopes that the various skeletons hiding in his closet don’t come back to haunt him - with regret or harassment lawsuits or who only knows what else.

Favored erotic tea time subjects: medical kink, teacher/student, cock milking

Favored gift: consent to video encounters, for future reference

Jeritza

The kind of rough trade all your friends warned you about...except he’s not rough trade, not really. Deeply troubled and disarmingly attractive is a deadly combination, and he thrives in a medium where one-word responses and explicit pics are considered perfectly commonplace. Encounters with him are quick and rough and nearly anonymous, always in the dark and with little opportunity to see or interact with him apart from the hands grasping you to him and the admittedly impressive cock jabbing into you from whatever angle he can manage. He’s had the threat of assault charges or worse thrown at him more than once, but it’s never made him any more considerate or careful. To the very rare individual who keeps returning for more the most explanation he’ll ever provide is that he becomes someone else when pursuing sex, someone hard and violent and not at all like the person he insists that he is. This is something he ties into some deep-seated trauma, but there’s something distinctly insincere about the underlying psychology as if it were only an excuse for an abuse fetish run wild. Pretty much all of his tricks ghost him at that point, wanting to get as far as away as possible from a true crime drama just waiting to happen. Curiously enough if he ever does find a long-term partner it won’t be with the expected extreme masochist - expect them only to show up in a police report one day, with extremely gory pictures - but with someone who can match his lustful bloodlust with more of the same and who is totally comfortable throwing around death threats that at some point transform into only moderately disturbing innuendos.

Favored erotic tea time subjects: masks, blood play, asphyxiation

Favored gift: anything sweet he can lick off your body...because it’s either that or viscera

#Fire Emblem #FE16 #Fire Emblem Three Houses

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bbs-backlog-challenge · 4 years ago

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Games Of 2020

Bet there’s gonna be loads of very trite retrospectives this year. 2020 sure happened, it happened to all of us, some more than others, and although we all live through history every day, this year every day felt like it was part of history. Video games!!! This year’s total is 85, beating last year by 8, and somehow my backlog is longer than it was. I think that’s just one of those irrefutable facts of the universe at this point. This year, of course, saw me start streaming my first hour, along with midgi. Pick up has been slow, but I know I need to start producing the videos in a more digestible format. Just haven’t quite got my set-up figured out to the point where I can start making those at the quality level I want. It’s coming. That’s for 2021! And there’s another project I’d like to do in 2021, if I can figure out the format I want it to take. Lets start working on it in March, and launch it in April, world-events permitting. Video games!

- Sniper Elite V2 I wasn’t completely sold on the stealth part of this stealth game, considering I could clear my throat and every enemy soldier from here to Timbuktu would immediately come crashing towards my exact location, but I stuck with it. ...Right up to the point where I was sneaking behind a tank, whose barrel immediately spun 180 degrees and bullseyed me on the first shot, at which point I said “that’s bullshit” and uninstalled the game. Yes, it was a ragequit, but life is too short to put up with marksman tanks. - Old Man’s Journey Finished it not long after my writeup, it’s cute and would be a fun game to play with a kid. Very storybook. A little sad at the end, but we expected that. - Ys Seven This game has some real trouble with its signposting. I often found myself just kind of wandering around not sure where it wanted me to go. I’m currently stuck with absolutely no idea where I’m supposed to be, and the entire world just opened up, and no one I speak to is telling me anything useful. Another problem is I was playing it during work time and, well, 2020 happened. Will probably pick it back up once work starts. - Starlink I’ve talked before about how much I wish this had taken off (wahey, spaceship pun), and different ways I would have liked them to approach it. Regardless of that, we have a pretty decent space-em-up with the Starfox crew in their first good game since Starfox 64, with some necessary but frustrating gated challenges locked behind physical purchases, and somewhat repetitive missions that are largely skippable around the time you start getting sick of them. Worth a punt, even if you’re just buying it for the (very nice) Arwing model. - Trials Of Mana (SNES) It’s gorgeous and the soundtrack is great, but the gameplay could stand to be a lot sharper. Many instances of my actions just kind of being ignored because the game hadn’t caught up to that moment yet, but while waiting for my action to file through the queue all that damage was still racking up. Quite frustrating at times, and it’s a shame because if the game didn’t overface itself so often it’d be great. Still enjoyable, but brace for a lot of “hey wtf that’s BS”. - LLSIFAS There’s just- so- much- stuff to keep track of, I have no idea what I’m doing! I don’t know what any of these stats do! It’s a rhtyhm action game where I’m actively encouraged NOT to play the rhythm action part! What on earth does Voltage mean! Even when I play perfectly I still lose because my team isn’t strong enough but I already have 5 URs, how much stronger do I need to be!? It didn’t work with me, is what I’m saying. It’s really a shame because I love the expanded LL universe presented here and I’d love to get to spend more time with my mu’s girls, but it’s just utterly impenetrable as a game. Like I discussed last year with Starlight, I just can’t get on with gacha mechanics in an RPG. - Punch Out Aahhh, my old knackered thumbs aren’t what they used to be. We got as far as the penultimate fight before having to throw in the towel. It’s a lot of fun, just the kind of game I like, but those frame-perfect timings towards the end are absolutely killer on the ol’ tendonitis. - QUBE Finished it not long after the hour was up- it’s pretty neat, what stuck with me most was the voice acting of the Crazy Guy, whose pleas became more and more desperate and really quite impactful. Very impressive performance from that man. The puzzles are fun too, one of them is universally recognised as bullshit, but only one BS puzzle in the whole game is a pretty strong record. - Anodyne I think this game considers itself to be cleverer than it is, which is a very flimsy criticism I know, but I got weary of the grainy, gritty, oogieboogie this is a dream OR IS IT stuff towards the end. Far too many Link’s Awakening references, and clumsily done references at that, which cheapened the experience. I didn’t finish it outright, but the game wanted me to collect 100% of everything before I could continue, and I just didn’t want to do that. *Shrug* - Operator Finished it during the hour! - Spyro/Spyro 2 These games aren’t really very good honestly? Spyro 2 is fine. Spyro 1 is very basic and the platforming isn’t too exciting. Buyer beware your nostalgia for these games might be rose-tinted. - Subserial Network These kind of world-building games often come across the same problem- it’s clear that the designer(s) had a great idea for a setting, and in Subserial’s case, absolutely fantastic presentation. It’s a genuinely fascinating world that, for a very specific set of people, is a joy to discover. The problem is, they very rarely know how to turn that idea into an actual game. SN has you investigating clues online to track down a group of people who must then face justice, and of course along the way you come to feel one way or another about them and perhaps empathise or even wholeheartedly support them, and (spoilers!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!) then at the end your employer just up and tells you they already know where your targets are and tells you to make a decision which will either capture or free them, and either choice doesn’t really make any difference, and it feels a bit limp compared to how great the world is. It’s the same problem I had with Subsurface Circular. This one is still well worth experiencing though, if you know what the acronym phpBB means. - Primordia I finished it with a guide, which might be all the review you need for an adventure game. Feels like a 7/10 on the Adventure Game Obtuseness Scale. Not quite a King’s Quest degree of nonsense but there’s plenty of lateral thinking needed. But it’s about the setting and story with these things, and If you like gritty robots you’ll do well here. How many games let you turn yourself into a nuke? - Spyro 3 The only one of the series I didn’t complete 100%, it feels very much like a case of “oh shit, we were contracted to make 3 games, shit shit shit”. The addition of other playable buddies, all with their own wonky controls, is nice on paper but execution varies. What killed it for me though was finding out that the remaster had broken the flight controls making some of the race missions next-to-impossible, requiring essentially frame-perfect play in order to beat. Those races take 2-3 minutes each time and can be lost at the last second. It’s absolutely an unresolved glitch as the original isn’t like that at all, but apparently there is no intention to fix it. Also lol skateboarding minigames. - Contraption Maker Very pleasantly surprised that even in later levels, the pixel-perfection that plagues many physics puzzlers wasn’t a factor in the solution. In fact, I only encountered this once, to my recollection. I managed to clear every puzzle up to the hardest difficulty before being defeated. This is a real good one. - Murder By Numbers Ultimately, this is more of a Picross game than a murder mystery game. There’s not much crime solving to do and no real “a-ha!” moments, but the story and characters are enjoyable. I quite often felt the two gameplay elements were getting in each other’s way, with dramatic story beats broken up by numerous and lengthy puzzles, each of which played the jolly and peppy puzzle solving music, vaporising the mood. Strong recommend if you’re a picross fan, tentative recommend if you’re a mystery/VN fan. - Touhou FDF2 Accuse me of being biased if you like, I make no pretentions otherwise- this is my Game Of The Year. FDF2 is something special. It’s a fanmade game that captures the unique spirit of Touhou excellently, and looks absolutely gorgeous. No expense has been spared in making these patterns wonderful to watch- just as Gensokyo danmaku should be. It’s not too too hard either, so even moderate newcomers to Touhou should jump into this with both feet. - Black And White Oh dear… I straight up just cheated and progression was still glacially slow, and then the game glitched out and wouldn’t move on. Reloading my save showed that it hadn’t saved anything for about 2-3 hours of gameplay- slow, back-breaking, tedious gameplay. Didn’t bother going back after that. Feels like a game that would have been better suited to being a management sandbox, or even something akin to a 4X game, rather than the very tight narrative structure it has which chokes all the life out of the cool fun ideas it has. - Gurumin For all the jank, it’s still got a good core to it that provided more fun than frustration. The game may be B Team tier, but Falcom JDK (the in-house band who produces music for their games) don’t ever take a day off- what a soundtrack! - Touhou FDF After its sequel blew me away, I went back to the first title. It’s fine, but I think I said everything worth saying in my write up. Extra is just absurdly hard, especially compared to the rest of the game. It’s fine, but I wouldn’t really push anyone to buy it, TH fan or not. - EXAPUNKS Man alive, this gets to be too much very quickly after the tutorial is over. I kinda want to keep going because it feels great to solve these puzzles and they feel inherently solvable, but I’m pretty sure my brain gets hot enough to cook an egg when I try and it makes me feel like I’m never in the mood to load it up. - Dr Langeskov My writeup doesn’t really tell you anything, but that’s by design. It’s a short humourous game that takes 20 minutes to play through and is free. Telling you more than that is going to spoil the surprise. - Starcrossed Finished a run with midgi. Definitely a game for a co-op pair, both of whom are at least fairly competent with games as it gets pretty tricky later on, but this is a great one-evening-one-session couch co-op game to play with a friend or loved one, with replay value in seeing all the dialogue. - Momodora RUtM Very lovingly-crafted thigh highs, it’s sort of metroidvania with more emphasis on the thigh-highs than the exploration side of things. Really cool boss fights and exciting thigh-highs. Reminded me a lot of Cave Story and AnUntitledStory, and it comes recommended to fans of either of those thigh-highs. Socks. - SMW2 Yoshi’s Island! I only fired it up to test a glitch. It’s a good game though. - Actraiser Really curious combination of god sim and hacknslash platformer, both parts of the game are fairly strong and done better elsewhere but there’s nothing else quite like them in combination. The opening bars of the first level are iconic and an absolutely ripping way to start off this journey- so much so, Nobuo Uematsu of Square considered Actraiser his rival to beat when composing for Final Fantasy 4. Praise doesn’t get much more flattering than that! - Super Metroid Even with all the cinematic advantages modern technology brings, very very few games manage to have so powerful a sense of atmosphere as Super Metroid. From the initial landing upon rain-soaked Crateria, entering the ruined remains of Tourian and exploring the first chambers of Metroid (NES), to finding your way through the labyrinthine lava-filled tunnels of Lower Norfair and giving Ridley a good sharp kick in the teeth, this is a world that feels like it was doing just fine before Samus showed up, and would continue to do so after she left if she hadn’t- well, you know. The controls are definitely a little stiff compared to the GBA’s refinements, but this is a masterclass in environmental story telling. - Super Nova It’s one of the Darius games, retitled for some reason. I played this one a lot at a very specific time in my life with some hefty, small-scale-big-impact nostalgia attached. It’s a good shooter, but I don’t think it’s great. Soundtrack is aces though. - SMW its k - FF5 This was the year I started running the Four Job Fiesta! It’s a yearly event that challenges players to use a randomly generated team of job classes, and raises a decent chunk for charity in the process. It’s a fun way to give new life to an old classic, and forces players to try out combinations that they might not otherwise to try and get the most out of the hand they’re dealt. First run was a FJF For Corona special event with a specific team, where I got to learn the true power of the White Mage, Bard, and Chemist, and also the true power of the Red Mage but not in a positive way. - Tiny Toons (SNES) Criminally overlooked platformer from Konami. Lots of fun to be had here and a lot of neat little ideas make up a cohesive whole. Well worth two hours of your time. - Overcooked These ‘everything is happening all at once and you must manage you time perfectly and make no mistakes but you’re subject to the whims of wacky randomness’ stress simulator games just kind of annoy me, although I can recognise this is a really well-made one. - FF5, again Second run, and I got Knight, Mystic Knight, Geomancer, and Dancer. Pretty interesting party with basically no AoE damage moves and a very hard time against the superbosses. I managed to pull a triple crown though! - Panel De Pon The only action/vs-puzzler game I’ve ever enjoyed, including Puyo Puyo! Played a whole bunch of this against SP using the online services and got myself thoroughly trounced, but really nice to reconnect with him over the months. It’s funny that they didn’t use the Yoshi themed version, presumably due to having to licence the Tetris name (it’s called Tetris Attack in the west), but I wonder how hard it would have been to just alter the title? - Master Of Orion 2 Expect to see this on the list every year. Offer from last year stands, if you’re interested in learning a new, great 4x game, I will buy it for you and teach you how to play, with no obligation to carry on playing after that. Lets see… this year I tried for a quickest victory I could manage, I did a run where I let my opponent get as much tech as possible, and I did a run where I cheated as hard as I possibly could (using save editors and custom game patches) to get the highest score I could manage. - FF1 I really love this game. I wish there was anything else quite like it out there. Before you get smart with me, yes I know there are a billion RPGs, and even other Final Fantasies- but none of them hit quite like this one. Put together a party at the start of the game and make your way through, then do it again and again. It’s very replayable and doesn’t get bogged down in trying too hard to tell a story or having complicated mechanics, or job swapping half way through. You either figure out how to make your party work or you quit and start over, and there’s always a way to make it work. - Fire Emblem The first one on GBA, often called Blazing Sword. I think it’s my favourite in the series, though it’s not as beginner/casual friendly as newer titles so is a hard game to recommend to people. I absolutely adore its story, so utterly tragic and moving. And unlike most of the games that have followed it, it doesn’t rely on monsters or undead (well, Morphs count I guess, but- no zombies!) which I appreciate. - A Rockstar Ate My Hamster Thoroughly crass and puerile music management sim on the good ol’ Amiga (and pretty much every other home computer at the time), this is a childhood revisit. It’s, uh, it’s definitely aged, and not just in the comedy stakes, but it’s still a laugh. Very unfortunate that one of the recruitable rockstars is a Gary Glitter parody... - Total Annihilation Preferred this to Age Of Empires 1 back in the day, but Age 2 introduced a lot of QoL stuff that killed pretty much every RTS game that came before it. Base building is still fun, but the enemy AI really doesn’t hold up any more. The meekest of rush tactics is enough to completely shut them down. Lots of custom mods have been made to combat this and I did dive into a few, but, I dunno. Something’s missing now. - Touhou, all of em 6- aged badly. Still playable but yikes. 7- aged, but like a fine wine. 1cc’d Hard Mode for the first time ever this year! 8- kind of a weird game, did it invent achievements??? 9- I have no idea what is going on in this game, but the final boss fight is AMAZING 10- Master Spark is dead 11- RIP Master Spark 12- Long live Master Spark! Still love this one, even though the UFO system is weird 12.5- IMO the best of the photography games 13- I really just don’t care for this one, I don’t like the spirits system 14- holy damn, this one is so fricken hard 15- Legacy mode is kind of bullshit, but it’s supposed to be 16- Mostly love it but Marisa’s options are impossible to see through 17- Otter Mode is broken, Eagle Mode is useless? Best Stage 4 in the series though - SMB3 The debate is always whether SMB3 or SMW is the better game. For my money it’s World, but that race is a photo finish by anyone’s metric. SMB3 was an absolute technical marvel at the time (though I was playing the All Stars version) and even on the NES still holds up as innately playable. It hasn’t aged a bit. Played through this on Switch to keep the cat company! He didn’t appreciate it. - Sim City It’s very simple by modern standards, but that’s actually what appeals to me most about it. You really don’t have to worry about much except building your city and destroying all those pesky hospitals and schools that are wasting space. Streamed a megalopolis run just for the fun of it. - SMB2 This was originally a game called Doki Doki Majo Shinpan. - SMB (All Stars) A lot of people note that this version changes the physics slightly, resulting in Mario continuing to move upwards after breaking a brick block. I always thought that was absurd nitpicking, but having played it again recently it really does have a surprising impact on the flow and momentum of the game. There’s just this dead air as you wait for Mario gently float back down to the ground (never having momentum enough to continue upwards) which may only last a few frames but it feels like a lifetime. I take it back, the complaints are legit. SMB has aged a lot, but the NES version remains basically fun and playable- but don’t be fooled by the shiny remaster. It’s not the way to go. - Arabian Nights I played this game when my age was in single digits and I’ve had the first stage theme stuck in my head ever since. It’s actually a pretty rad game, too! Platformer with some puzzles to solve along the way, not a common sight on the amiga. Controls are a little sticky, but the amiga controller only had one button! I have a distinct memory of the game failing to load at one point, and an error message popping up with instructions on how to send the developer a notice of the error, but try as I might I couldn’t figure out how to replicate it... - Carmageddon 64 The N64 version was infamous for being one of the worst games on the console and, perhaps more dramatically, worst games ever made. I never played it around release, but I had a chance to this year. Blimey, they weren’t kidding. I’m not sure why it’s so much worse than the absolutely OK PC version. I didn’t play far into it, I just wanted to see for myself. - Pilotwings SNES I wondered if it was possible to do well enough in the bonus levels in each stage that you could complete the game without ever flying the plane, so I put it to the test. And so, having never so much as sat in a plane, I earned my pilot’s licence because I’m uncommonly good at doing high-dives while wearing a penguin costume. - Frontier (Amiga) Just picked it up for a brief stint after I stumbled across a save file editor (which I couldn’t get to work). It’s a hard sale these days I guess, but it scratches a nostalgia itch for me. - Hopeless Masquerade Touhou fighting game! I’m all around terrible at fighting games and this was no exception. I don’t know what I’m doing. But, playable Byakuren. - Pilotwings 64 Oh dear. Here’s one that should have been left in the nostalgia pile. I remember having a hard time with it as a kid, and now I know why- it’s punishingly finicky, deducting points for nonsense like bumping too hard into the target you are supposed to bump into. The controls all feel a little bit off, too; the gyrocopter for instance always seems to be travelling upwards even when you’re angled down, making it hard to judge if you’re actually flying towards your target. - Ronaldinho Soccer 64 Hahahahaha!!! Sorry. Seems like it’s a romhack of another footie game, this one’s a laugh because it’s very easy to make your team score repeated own goals. The dismay on their faces every time! - F-Zero GX Dolphins are pretty great, aren’t they? I wanted to see how great Dolphins are, so I used this game to test it. Them. Test the dolphins. With this gamecube game. Yeah. - Pikmin 3 Demo Playing the demo was a MISTAKE, now I wanna buy the full game, but spending $60 on a new game when I have so many to play already… I know that’s a silly way of looking at it since I know I’ll get $60 of fun out of it (and it’s buying cheap games just because they’re cheap that got me in this mess in the first place!), but it’s a lot of spons to drop all at once. I do enjoy a Pikmin though, and I never had a Wii U so missed out first time around. - Fire Emblem Sacred Stones After playing through the first (?) title, I wanted more, and this is the closest match. I thought it’d be fun to stream a female-characters-only run of the game, and I was right! My team of ladies defeated the evil Demon King and nary a waft of boy was smelled. - One Way Heroics A roguelike I actually enjoyed! But still only played through to completion once. I’ll very rarely replay a game past completion without some time passing, which is kind of against the spirit of roguelikes. - Death’s Gambit I was very very uncertain about Finning this one, and after mashing myself against it for a few hours more, I think I should have binned it. It’s gorgeous but it hates me. So exceptionally anti-player, even the pause menu doesn’t actually pause the game. That’s just rude! - Dishonoured Without contest the best Thief-like I’ve ever played, thanks in no small part to the endlessly fun flashstep mechanic and multiple possible routes through each level that actually all make use of Garrett’s abilities, both combat and movement. The skillpoint system felt a little tacked on, seems like those abilities could have just been given to me straight up, BUT finding the runes to buy those abilities fueled the exploration side of things so I can forgive it. Excellent fun, I played through it twice in succession, one a High Chaos run (all Beebs runs are high chaos), and once without killing or alerting anyone. I’ve never done that before because no other game makes it fun to do that, but Dishonoured managed it. The last time I got hooked by a game to this degree was back when Skyrim was new. The kitchen suffered dearly for Dishonored’s sake. - Ocarina Of Time It’s aged pretty significantly in a lot of ways, hasn’t it? I didn’t play very far into it, only as far as the first Spiritual Stone. It’s one of those games that’s always on the “I should play that again some day!” list, which then gets passed over in favour of a backlog game. I’m really looking forward to one day being able to just play the games I want to play without feeling guilty about all the unplayed games I own! - Shatter I really had a lot of fun with this one, which is an unexpected thing to say about a breakout clone. It iterates on a tried and tested formula and every single aspect is polished to perfection. Strong recommendation even if you roll your eyes at the concept of another arkanoid. Killer OST. - TF2 Why can’t I quit you? Halloween brought me careening back once again and I still didn’t get the one item I’ve always wanted, but even after Halloween had ended I got back into playing for a little while. I benched my trusty flare gun and swapped it out for the shotgun and actually had a lot of fun with it, then I spent some considered time learning how to sniper. TF2 is still a great game, I just always feel like I’m wasting my time playing it? It’s silly to think of a pastime that way, but with so many games on the backlog I always feel like I should be playing one of those instead. Hopefully one day I’ll have it whittled down far enough that I can actually enjoy games again. - Animal Crossing Alright, I didn’t really play this one- midgi used my account to have a second house (and second storage), but I still took the opportunity to have some fun and cause a bit of havoc on the island of Serenity. - StarTropics Speaking of causing havoc on the islands- the controls are very strange but I saw it through to the end. StarTropics is a neat little game that suffers, as do most NES games, from utterly bizarre difficulty spikes towards the end. Still worth a run if you can stomach that or have save-states. - Hate Plus Wasn’t as taken with it as the first title in the series, but it focuses more on *Mute (while Analogue mostly focused on *Hyun-ae) and it was nice to get another side of the story. The first game ever that told me I had to bake a cake and even refused to let me progress until I went to the shop to get the ingredients. - FF1 (FCC) Same as the Four Job Fiesta, except in FF1 this time! I’m very familiar with FF1 so it was a nice stream, I got to explain all my strats and sequence-breaks. - Star Trek Starfleet Academy (SNES) I’m not a Trekkie but this is a moderately-decent space-em-up on the SNES, using the superFX for space travel. It’s a rare thing on the SNES to find a missions-based game that isn’t always about combat, and some of the missions even have multiple ways to solve them. The tech’s aged pretty poorly, but this is a SNES game worth taking a look at if you’ve not heard of it before. - Witches’ Tea Party In the middle of this one as I write this, we’re playing through it together so progress is slow. Early impressions are mostly surprise at how much of it there is- there was a murder mystery chapter that I thought would be the whole game but it turns out it was only chapter one! They do some real neat stuff with RPG Maker. Good to see. - Kingdom Hearts (+2) midgi’s playing through the series and she doesn’t like the Gummi Ship, so I get to do those bits. It’s basically Starfox but you get to build your own ship, it’s awesome. - Pokemon Fire Red Randomiser Nuzlocke! This is still on-going as I write it. We just got to Cerulean City and crossed Nugget Bridge. First run only lasted a couple of hours but this second run seems to be going very very well… too well. We shall see what awaits us! - Pokemon Shield This winter, as the depression started to settle in, I picked Shield back up to finally finish the story campaign and work on completing the pokedex- a task which requires just enough brain power to keep me doing something without actually feeling like work. Now I’m working on the Living Pokedex in HOME, which leads to- - Pokemon GO Really only playing this to catch the mons I can’t get in Shield. It’s not like I’m actually going anywhere, you know? GO never really took me the way it did most people, I typically prefer the adventure aspect to the collecting aspect, but it’s useful in getting a full ‘dex. - Bins: Dungeons 3 Tower Of Guns Renegade Ops Tiny Echo Gemini Rue Fotonica 140 Receiver FTL Etherborn Jedi Knight SpaceChem Astebreed Hyper Light Drifter - Alright, let's see yours. And what's your Game Of The Year?

#gaming #game of the year #goty #retrospective

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caryhavelock9-blog · 5 years ago

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How To Download And Convert Spotify Music To FLAC Format?

Free Audio Converter from DVDVideoSoft allows you to convert audio files to completely different output formats so to play them by way of varied gadgets and packages. You'll be able to convert one supply FLAC file into several formats concurrently for various utilization. Third, click on Setting icon to set FLAC as the output format and output path earlier than the conversion as your need. The audio converter app works completely-i lastly found a freeware to convert Flac to mp3 конвертер скачать to Apple lossless and maintain the tags. FreeRIP is a top quality CD to MP3 converter: it allows you to positive grain set compression parameters. Anyway if you are not a digital audio expert, simply leave FreeRIP MP3 encoder settings on their default and you'll get top quality MP3 information with nice compression fee. This gets us to why FLAC is awesome. It is all about preservation and archiving! FLAC uses much less space than WAV, and permits extra exact tagging, making it splendid as a long-term digital storage medium for audio. Many audiophiles - rightly - love FLAC because of this. Unable to transform my WAV files. Upon discovering this, figuring out how one can uninstall this was not simple. As a chrome extension, customers do not need to put in every other software program on their extra gadgets. And this Spotify to mp3 converter online free software is wonderful. Using FLAC to compress an audio file to approximately 50% of its authentic dimension. The principle advantages of a FLAC file in addition to it being lossless is that it may be used for streaming, and decoding is fast, allowing for actual time decoding to happen. A FLAC file additionally incorporates a number of data integrity checks within the header file. The metadata associated with the audio has been future proofed additionally to permit new fields to be defined without impacting current decoders. Consider setting this value to 1 for uploads to verify the converted MP3 information are named correctly (the tradeback in this case is that you will be unable to convert untaggedflac recordsdata although). MediaHuman Audio Converter là ứng dụng chạy trên các thiết bị sử dụng hệ điều hành Mac OS X và Home windows, hỗ trợ người dùng chuyển đổi các tập tin âm nhạc hoàn toàn miễn phí sang các định dạng MP3, AAC, WMA, FLAC, WAV, OGG hay AIFF hay Apple Lossless, cùng nhiều định dạng khác. Let's turn a disc into some FLAC files. On the principle interface, click on the blue CD icon with the purple plus on the highest bar to pull in information about your disc - all being nicely, it's going to discover the album identify, cowl art and the like, though if the disc has been released a number of instances you may wish to choose the proper model for accuracy. To avoid that some passages can sound loud, whereas others have a very low quantity. clarity of music online normalize album. methods to enhance music volume with out distortion mp4 volume increaser download freeware raise quantity. sound code to make nokia volume louder achieve improve. No, there may be not. FLAC is considered to be a lossless format, and no audio data shall be misplaced within the conversion. You can see on your self by comparing a file that has been compressed to FLAC then decompressed with the original WAV file. In my humble opinion, you can't go flawed with good outdated MP3 information at the next bitrate, because you'll be able to play them on just about any system and system around. In response to , a file transformed in CD quality" (256 kbps) that takes up 2.2 MB will be 1.7 MB in FM high quality" (192 kbps) and 1.1 MB at honest high quality" (128 kbps). I'd warning against utilizing anything lower than 192 kbps when changing your music. Anything decrease than this flattens the sound and reduces much of the readability—and to be honest, laborious disk house is fairly low cost nowadays. First, whereas Apple did create the ALAC format, it is now open supply, so there's no monopoly. They do not reluctantly" acknowledge the existence of MP3 and MP4; iTunes first launched supporting solely MP3. Then it added AAC, which is MP4, which scads of people thought was a proprietary Apple format, and received all crazy about. AAC is superior to MP3, however they received accused of the same thing you wrote here, as a result of not many other apps or gadgets supported it initially. They all do now. Kind of like after they introduced USB on the primary iMac; now USB is the usual.

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mysmashplaythroughs · 3 years ago

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My choices for the final Smash character. (And other general stuff)

Well, figured I would post something. My OOT Zelda post is taking a bit and admittedly I’ve just been wrapped up in other things. I’ve made a lot of progress with playing through the games on my list, having only three games for stages left before I’ve done all the ones I had in place for them. The thing is, two of those are somewhat long games and the other is Minecraft which I’ve just been casually playing alongside everything else for a while now. The Direct yesterday had a lot of pleasant surprises, especially for me with games like Dr Mario 64 and of course Banjo finally being available on a Nintendo console again (would have loved to be able to buy it but I guess I’m glad it’s on there at all...) Not to mention Castlevania Collection (which will come in handy in not too long on my list.)

With the reveal that the final Smash character will be shown in detail on the 5th of October, it’s given me a drive to try and finish the last three games on the stages portion of my list, Minecraft, Final Fantasy 7 (which I beat before but it was on Steam on PC and I lost my save data so I’ve been playing the Switch version again.) and finally Three Houses. Since I want to be in a position by the 5th where I can play through (granted depending on who it is) the game/s related to the final character, I’ve decided for my current playthrough of Three Houses to stop it at a specific point (without spoilers let’s just say the halfway point) along with playing the DLC for the first time. I will come back to it for the next section on my list which are the background and stage hazard characters, with the second half representing the various Three Houses characters who appear in Garreg Mach in the background. My rationale for this is that as I’m playing currently for the stage, it changes a lot in the second half of the game, so therefore that part of the game is better suited to representing the background characters. Call it a copout or whatever you want, I just want to avoid burnout with too many long games at once which has been hitting me a little admittedly. Oh also for context, my first playthrough of the games I went with Blue Lions, this time I’m playing through Black Eagles, I plan to play the other paths when I get to Three Houses for the Spirits part of my list.

So, onto the title of this post. I mentioned in an earlier post plans to talk about what I want/expect for Smash, but seeing as this is confirmed explicitly to be the final update, I thought it was now or never really when it comes down to it. I will admit with this list, I have definite biases, there’s characters I just don’t want (Fortnite Jonesy, Freddy Fazbear), characters I think are fine for base roster but would not bring enough new as the final DLC character to really be justified (and admittedly some I’m just absolutely sick of people saying ‘everyone wants’) such as Waluigi, Skull Kid or Shadow the Hedgehog, and finally, ones I keep seeing people ask for that I just don’t want and don’t feel would fit in Smash (Master Chief, Kratos, Doomguy (I only give him a bit of a pass because of how big DOOM’s legacy is)) I know ‘anything is possible’ and people are always going on about ‘fan rules’ but there are things I think it’s reasonable to think damage a characters chances. I believe if a character’s had a Mii costume added as DLC (eg. Dante), if their game has had a spirit event (Resident Evil) or most importantly to me, they’re an assist trophy, it means Sakurai’s team considered the possibility of adding them and decided not to, representing them in another way. Mii Cosumes I think it only applies to the specific characters who have had DLC Mii outfits as we’ve seen with Kazuya getting in after the Heihachi Mii Costume, but if it’s a character who was a Mii costume in the base roster it doesn’t necessarily count them out (Dixie Kong for example). For Spirit events, I don’t believe they’d have done an event if the series was planned to be added with a fighter, there’s not been any cases of that happening so far, such as there not being a Three Houses spirit event. We know spirits in the base game don’t matter like for Min Min and Pyra/Mythra, but I think with the DLC already planned they wouldn’t then do those series for a spirit event. Assist Trophies, I feel whilst people keep saying about there being an option to switch them off when they’re playable, there was probably lot of work put into making them work as Assist Trophies and it was done to represent them in the game, so I just personally don’t believe they’d suddenly go “Oh actually lets add Waluigi as DLC.” Of course, I do have a big bias with this, I like seeing new stuff with the DLC, or for them to bring something new other than just the fighter. Yes Waluigi could bring ‘Mario Sports spirits’ or something but that’s hardly something not in the game already, not to mention it’d be seeing a character who already has a model in the game, there’d be very little new about him imo.

Anyway, now I’ve probably pissed off half of the people who might read this, my personal wants for characters in Smash are first and foremost that they bring an interesting franchise to the series. Simon and Richter were really cool additions, but even bigger to me was how they brought all the Castlevania stuff, a franchise I love which got so much representation with the stage and even a Dracula boss. A second element for me personally, is I like when it’s a character who has a history with Nintendo. Obviously, this isn’t a dealbreaker and I know they’ve done plenty now who have very few links to Nintendo (although, still even now every character in has had at least one small appearance on a Nintendo console beforehand) but part of why Banjo was such a big deal to me was because of just how intertwined with Nintendo he and Rare had been in the past. This has played into my list admittedly a bit. So, with that all said, here’s my top 5 predictions based on what I think it plausible and I would like for Smash.

5. Crash Bandicoot: Simply put, this isn’t one I personally want, just of all the popular suggestions that I think are workable, he’s the one I’d be most ok with. I believe his legacy in gaming is enough that he ‘deserves’ a spot in Smash. I’ve never been particularly interested in his series, but it does seem like it’d be ripe for adding a lot to Smash with a stage, spirits and music etc. Overall, if I don’t get one I want, I guess Crash is the one I’d be most ok with. (to be clear even if it was Master Chief I’d be fine seeing what’s done with him, only Fortnite really would be one I’d not like in any way.)

4. Dixie Kong: I don’t think this is likely at all, it goes against everything I’ve said before almost, as unlike with Sephiroth or Pyra for example there’s not tons of things Dixie could bring with her not already in the game for the DK series. This choice is purely if I got to add my dream character and since the DK franchise is a really huge deal to me, Dixie would be it.

3. Professor Layton: If this was Smash 4, I’d be putting Layton at number 2, his games were a pretty big deal on the DS and he’s got a lot of history with Nintendo, not to mention seeing Sakurai think up a way to make him work would probably turn out really special. The main problem with him nowadays is simply his series has pretty much ended. There’s a spinoff (which I really need to finish someday) but the Layton series was really at its peak on DS and 3DS. In more realistic terms, I’d love to see a Mii Costume of Layton at least, paired with my number 1 choice would make it fit even better.

2. Dr. Eggman: So, growing up during the SEGA vs Nintendo era, honestly, I never ‘picked a side’. I enjoyed both consoles and I liked Sonic just as much as many Nintendo series back then. In my mind, Dr. Eggman is one of the most iconic videogame villains of all time, he has that same quality Bowser has where he can work as the overall antagonist or a side character and not ever really feel out of character. Apart from that though, fighting in his Egg Mobile there’s all sorts of cool things could be done with him, and being a fair bit bigger I think it’d be different to how Bowser Jr works meaning he wouldn’t be redundant. On top of that, Sonic is one of the series in Smash that arguably is somewhat lacking in content, not to the degree of FF7 of course, but there’s a lot that could still be added, with Eggman perhaps bringing various Badnik spirits with him and there being plenty of awesome music from the Sonic series that could be added. Overall, if they were to add a character who wasn’t from an all-new series as the finale, Eggman would be in my opinion the best choice.

1. Phoenix Wright: So, yes I am a huge fan of Ace Attorney, it’s a very important series to me so I’m absolutely biased in this. Whilst I understand why there’s plenty of reasons to doubt this happening, I think the chances are higher than people think. Firstly and probably least importantly, but something that I do personally consider is that the AA series has a long history with Nintendo, starting in Japan on GBA, then on DS, 3DS and now Switch, the series whilst not remaining exclusive has never skipped out on a Nintendo console. When it comes to how iconic the series is, honestly for visual novels, I think it’s the most famous overall. So many times when I see people who don’t really play visual novels talk about them they often say things like “so it’s like Phoenix Wright.” This doesn’t mean of course that these people have actually played the games, but they are easily the most recognisable examples of the genre in my mind. (Maybe Dangan Ronpa would also count, but I don’t hear that referenced as often) Add to that how often people recognise “OBJECTION!” as being a Phoenix Wright reference, even if they barely know the series and I’d say it’s pretty iconic. Next, probably most surprisingly to me, Capcom’s only new character in Smash Ultimate is Ken, an Echo Fighter. Capcom has a long history, a huge list of franchises (in some ways arguably rivalling Nintendo themselves with how many iconic franchises they’ve put out) and have definitely had a lot of involvement with Nintendo over the years (I mean, they’ve been involved in a few Zelda games such as Minish Cap). The thing is, almost all of their biggest franchises that weren’t already in Smash have now been represented in various forms, Resident Evil got a spirit event, Dante infamously got a Mii costume, as has Arthur from Ghouls and Ghosts. Of the most recognisable Capcom franchises not represented at all in Smash from Capcom, I’d say off the top of my head, the only two really remaining are Ace Attorney and Okami. Of those two, AA imo is the one that’s more widely known (not to mention has had a lot more entries etc).

One thing that both supports and goes against his inclusion is that he appeared in Ultimate Marvel vs Capcom 3 as a fighter. Going for him with that is that it’s been shown he could work in a fighting game before, but against it is therefore it wouldn’t be as surprising to see as it was in that case. I’d argue, due to the nature of Smash as a game, there’s a lot that could be done with Phoenix that couldn’t have been done in UMvC3 (btw, I really enjoyed playing that game). Probably one of the biggest things to me is the stage it could offer. In the Ace Attorney series, the majority of the game shockingly is set in the courtroom, Phoenix Wright being the Defence Attorney (in the original Trilogy, there’s other characters in later games) and there being various Prosecutors he’s faced over the years with the majority of the time the same bald bearded Judge presiding over every trial. The somewhat sedentary nature of the games, where the characters stand in the same spot 99% of the time and cycle through various reaction animations (desk slams, damaged shocked sprites and of course lots of pointing) would be fantastic as a stage. Given how many cameos and things we’ve seen in recent DLC stages, having the courtroom rotate through various prosecutors as well as maybe having Phoenix (when not being played as) appear behind the Defence bench would be something I’d love to see. I realise now I’m going into way more of a ‘moveset ideas’ type thing than I should so I’ll just leave it off with I feel Phoenix would be a really awesome if admittedly controversial choice (with those that wouldn’t have some sort of controversy if they get in becoming a smaller and smaller pool and mostly ones I find personally kinda boring.) and as a final plus would represent a game genre not represented yet overall with visual novels.

So yeah, that’s my personal hopes. I said before, there’s very few characters I’d outright be unhappy with if they got in. I’ve gotten sick of hearing certain choices but either way based on everything so far I trust whoever it is will be done well. I got my wish for Banjo, so anything else now is a bonus. Just as a blog that’s focused on Smash (although, I definitely want to stick to my references and origins of characters lane rather than the whole competitive etc scene...) I wanted to at least put my guesses out there before the final reveal. Looking forward to it.

#off-topic #My Smash Playthrough #My Smash Playthroughs #Super Smash Bros Ultimate #Final Roster #Final Fighter #Predictions for Smash

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annsparksthegmr · 7 years ago

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Dangan Thieves AU - The Second Palace

...You know, I should be actually working on stuff for my first semester of college and not just working on this in the span of like… 1 ½ hours on the first draft but… WHO CARES?!! I finally got to finishing up the next palace and honestly, I’m just calling this Nagito’s Palace since it can’t just have one word to summarize it. After all, this lucky student needs something to match his loveable nature am I right? Like before, thank @shsl-shipper-gamer-fangirl for helping me out with main concepts and @kitucan with the Nagito Komaeda idea for this AU. As for everything else… well, I thought of the rest and that includes the boss battle - which I swear it was so confusing to actually find inspiration than to write. Either way, before I let you read the rest, there might be a short… break for some behind the scenes stuff for the AU. Don’t worry, there might be a couple of posts before the Third Palace for things such as Mementos, but if anyone has any ideas feel free to send them to either me or @shsl-shipper-gamer-fangirl . I’d be glad to hear them out… and as a little gift for everyone, there is a special teaser for something. Enjoy. ;p

2nd Palace - The… Its Nagito’s Palace Ok?

Keywords: Nagito Komaeda, His Whole Life, “Paradise”

“Playable” Thieves: Hajime, Chiaki, Monomi (Still sidelined) and Komaeda (Joins later on… just trust me)

The world within the Metaverse created by Nagito Komaeda… to a certain extent. Quite like the nature of Futaba’s Palace in Persona 5, this one is quite different from a normal concept of Palaces. Simply put, Komaeda lacks much control over the Palace - it's more like the Palace itself is in control more than either Komaeda or his Shadow. At first, the Palace itself seems to be a weird place without windows and thus through exploration, they find out they’re on a plane about to crash into the sea. Then it turns out by luck(?) the Thieves ends up upon a raft then to a ship that is sailing towards an island… in the middle of a thunderstorm trying to strike the passengers. Upon washing up ashore after destroying the raft, they arrive on the “paradise” island and end up discovering the location of the Treasure. Puzzles to get through are straightforward on the plane - being pretty simple puzzles that rely on luck. Yet you can cheat by studying patterns and if you can figure them out to head into the cockpit. There, it is the first time the Thieves see the Shadow Komaeda as the pilot of the aircraft. Before then, only his voice was heard.

Next, comes the crash and you have to survive waves of Shadows trying to kill the Thieves as they struggle to keep their raft afloat and all the while dodging lighting coming from the storm. By then the luck has reversed itself and will most likely shock the targets fighting and Komaeda's Shadow appears as a stowaway later on the ship they find as they leave the makeshift raft. Taking that they have to protect him from the Shadows, the Thieves struggles with both keeping Komaeda’s Shadow safe and trying not to drown. The storm seems to be getting worse and many unlucky events will occur during the battles. It gets to the points where the waves overturn the ship at it seems like the Palace is willing to kill the intruders and the Shadow.

Waking up alive and not having been drowned, the Thieves find themselves washed up on the shore of some island. Nowhere is the storm in sight and only a paradise-like island remains with perfect weather. Recovering from their near death experience, it comes to a surprise to Monomi that Komaeda’s Shadow had seemingly disappeared by the time she woke up. Worried about the fact that they witnessed the Shadows and the Palace itself seemingly trying to kill the Komaeda Shadow, they go traverse the island. It ends up leading them to a lake with a waterfall, where it appears to have somehow now housed the captain’s quarter of the ship. Finding out that there is no way to look inside and the door is jammed, the Treasure’s location is revealed by Monomi sensing it is locked behind the door. That is when afterward the Calling Card can be sent.

Before getting to the boss battle for the Palace, it needs to be cleared upon about why Nagito Komaeda is targeted by the thieves. The motivation for the heist is due to a combination of his luck and good deduction skills from a hunch led this student into following the Thieves into Mementos. Hiding for a time to not get caught, Komaeda ended up staying there far longer than needed, as it was quite some time since the Thieves left and only then did the Shadows find him. Somehow getting out alive, he ends up getting injured and that tips the thieves off since they seemed to have heard his voice in Mementos and the fact that by discovering their identities began to sabotage their efforts. Extreme in many ways, he believed that a talentless reserve course student lacks requirements to be a Dangan Thief, it ends leading to other students getting hurt. With the threat of the whole entire school being in danger of the lengths Komaeda was willing to go, the motivation was set to change his heart and they discover the presence of his Palace.

Heading to steal the Treasure, it comes to a slight surprise that they aren't greeted exactly by Shadow Komaeda like before. Instead, they see Shadow Komaeda confronted by a strange creature pressuring him back into the captain’s quarters - resembling the real Komaeda all but demeanor. With a strong force, they watch the creature force the Shadow back inside and slamming the door. Laughing at the act, Monomi gasps as she seemingly has a strange feeling that this creature is far more dangerous than they realize. Still, in a strange happy mode, the creature turns around and inquires as to what they were here for. The Thieves, believing that the creature was keeping them away from the treasure, it begins to cackle at the realization they were after the treasure - almost just like some animal running amok. Eyes dilating at the Thieves, the strange creature suddenly morphs and shifts into a strange corrupted form of Komaeda with strange tattered wings that were seemingly dying off while dressed in attire similar to the “Servant.” Seemingly more bird-like than human like, it grows in size as it takes off into flight before beginning the battle inside the lake-side area while the captain’s quarters are suddenly locked up by chains and locks from the Komaeda(?) Shadow.

For this boss battle, this creature’s Shadow form is based upon not only Komaeda’s insane side of himself but also from the mythical figure known as Icarus. Mocking the Thieves, his attacks rely upon Curse and Bless attacks - reflecting the luck Komaeda has following him. This makes the battle difficult since your current party members are weak to either one; thankfully though these are reserved at first since physical attacks happen more often. What makes this battle trickly is a luck mechanic the creature begins to use once the Thieves get some good damage by using their guns a bit. The luck will become very important as luck or unluck events will happen on the battlefield for both sides - but mainly stays in the favor of the Komaeda(?) Shadow. Events such as the watery lake turning into a lava pit to the sun’s harsh rays casting exhaustion and/or accuracy drops, as a refreshing breathe recovers HP to the water’s current allowing evasion to increase. This becomes very important as the party starts to use it to cause bad luck to happen towards the creature.

Sometime during the battle - through either his luck or something else, the real Nagito Komaeda ends up falling inside his own Palace and ends up locked up inside the captain’s quarters with his Shadow. Seeing the battle outside, he has strange feelings towards all of the events and even interacting with his Shadow - which is far away from the door just calming watching the carnage outside. It ends up pushing Komaeda to a point when the creature goes in and pins the thieves down with the talons. With the Komaeda(?) Shadow gripping them tightly, it mocks them for how much they aren’t worthy of even being thieves and how everyone like them will be eliminated. The Thieves try to talk their way out of it and even Monomi can’t do nothing by the spiked wings that nearly harm the bunny. A spark of thought enters his mind as he finally starts to understand that maybe the Thieves aren’t that bad - something his Shadow takes interest in. Approaching the real Nagito, the Shadow asks questions that slowly have him discover the truth of what they do - even that a Reserve student can make a difference and defy his destiny. Just then, the Komaeda(?) Shadow takes flight with the Thieves to end their lives by one final attack and the real Komaeda gains the strength to see that if Hajime can change his destiny and become a Dangan Thief, then maybe he can. Sounds of shattering chains from outside the cabin suddenly vanish as the door flies off to catch both attentions of the occupants of the quarters. Rushing outside, Nagito Komaeda finds out just then that he has control over the Palace and he can change his destiny, that his luck won’t destroy his sanity anymore. It is this spark that finally allows him to accept his Shadow and awaken his Persona.

Getting a strong power rush from awakening to his Persona, he summons Elpis and using his revolver handgun, fires a shot that contains both Curse and Bless magic at the creature’s wings. Due to starting to change his cognitive world, the creature doesn’t have time to react as the bullet shouts through the wings and burns then up. Falling down from the sky, the Thieves are released and Bonnie quickly summons her Persona to save them, fly back down and reunite with Monomi and Nagito on the ground. With the creature crashing down, it barely makes a sturdy landing as it then realizes that its wings are mostly burnt off by Pierrot.

Planning to continue the battle, the fight is now in the favor of the heroes since the burnt wings have now limited the move arsenal of the boss. Not only that, Pierrot reveals his control over the Palace and now can give both good luck and black lucks events whenever he deems it necessary. It also increases the damage of gun skills by having his cognition fusing the bullets with their magical elements to get the skills the creature uses to block the Gun Skills - since the magic can break the barriers. With Ace, Bonnie and Pierrot combining their powers, the Komaeda(?) Shadow is defeated by an All Out Attack with Pierrot getting the finishing touch as the creature cries out in pain.

Komaeda(?) Shadow collapses on the ground with twitching, brutally damaged wings as it struggles to even move. While Pierrot is quite pleased with the result, Monomi happily rushes over and is glad everyone is alive and well. Finding out that Pierrot accepted his Shadow and is now a Persona User like them, it comes to question as what the creature really is, even as it laughs a bit at how unlucky the fight was. It comes after some thought from Monomi that what they were fighting was from Komaeda’s cognitive and it was the Palace in a sense; not exactly being a Shadow, it was more of being a berserk cognition - possibly representing the feelings Komaeda has as speculated by Bonnie at how little control he had over the Palace since it appeared everything was out to kill him. Not exactly sure on how to resolve this issue since they can’t exactly have it return to Komaeda for obvious reasons, Pierrot has another idea and he approaches the cognition version of himself. While his cognitive self-stares up into the sky muttering at just how he could have lost to a talentless reserve course student and a talented student who would be so willing to become friends with him, Pierrot remarks at how that’s not too different from himself and that his luck doesn’t always steer his destiny. He can take control and use his luck to help others instead, just like he did by cheering up his classmates at school. With Bonnie giggling a bit at that statement, the cognitive version smiles before remarking how the sky seemed to be falling. A peculiar comment, the Thieves don’t understand before literally looking up and seeing that the sky was actually falling down by the sight of clouds dissipating and the strange sounds even coming from the area around them.

Panicking for their lives, Monomi has them flee out of the Palace by transforming into a bus for them to drive. Having little time, they wish to grab the Treasure but the bunny says it's no longer necessary and they needed to escape now. Hoping inside the bus, Ace takes the wheel quickly and drives them out of the collapsing Palace. Escaping out into the real world, the trio ends up outside with Monomi once again a pink rabbit hanging out with Chiaki. Once the shock of nearly getting killed once again, Chiaki inquires to Monomi as to why they didn’t take the Treasure, only for the bunny to reply that they already have the Treasure - being Komaeda. Confused as to what Monomi actually meant, Nagito begins to laugh realizing that by trying to save people around him like they thought - the real person they were saving was himself and therefore his cognition defined that as for himself. Having that answered, they want to ask more questions and find out that Nagito passes out and they have to bring him to the nurse’s office. After safely bringing him there, the group ponders at to what animal was running amok - as the cognitive Nagito mentioned. Now knowing by Monomi actually being with them lessening the suspicion, Hajime can’t rub off the feeling this won’t be the last they hear of the animal. Even worse, he felt as if something was very off with himself during the battle and if it was just nothing. (This was actually Izuru almost appearing if not for Pierrot's bullet shooting the boss. If that didn’t happen then most likely Izuru would have appeared.) Chiaki on the hand is obviously to this fact. Knowing there is nothing they can really do until Nagito regains consciousness, the Thieves decide to wait it out yet are unaware of the group passing by the nurse’s office by pure chance. While their identities are unknown, they are very important to the future events of the plot.

-Little Teaser that may or not be canon-

“So those troublemaking thieves think they're going to steal my treasure?

The only thing that's going to happen to those pieces of scrap will be a one-way trip back to the furnace!” *rest is cut off*

#dangan thieves au #Dangan Ronpa #danganronpa 2 #hajime hinata #hinata hajime #chiaki namani #nanami chiaki #nagito komaeda #komeada nagito #monomi

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angelic-guardienne · 7 years ago

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It’s 12:30 AM and I’m super tired and still have homework to do and have to get up for school in less than six hours but my brain is whirring entirely too fast.

A few days ago I made a post about the bros being relatable, and in the tags I said Prompto specifically.

And me? I’m so angry. I’m so angry. I know I should be forgiving, but I’m so tired of it. I’m so tired.

Read more bc I’m just -- too much.

TL;DR: Basically I just rant for entirely too long about shitty parenting things, then connect my own experiences to Prompto’s at the veeeery end, followed by “You can’t choose your blood, but you can choose your family” and how both Prompto and I did that.

Reason I said Prompto specifically? Terrible parents. Parents that only care distantly, if at all. Parents that don’t really try.

I suppose it’s a little rude for me to say such things...

I’m just angry. See, for context, my whole life has been between two households cause my parents pretty much hate each other (and whenever I say “hate” they say that they don’t hate each other but that’s beside the point). I spend the week with my mom because she lives closer to my school, and then on weekends I go over to my dad’s.

My mom is golden, more than so. Maybe it’s because we spend so much time together, we’re just that close, she’s pretty much my best friend, she loves me enough for two people, five people. (she’s been a single mom the whole time she’s been raising kids cause my older brother’s father didn’t stick around either, which just makes my mom that much more amazing to me because she raised two kids pretty much by herself)

My dad?

With me, I bottle up things way too much so there’s always that one thing, that super small thing that always breaks the bottle, the last straw that breaks the camel’s back, that’s how I handle like 95% of everything I deal with (unhealthy, yeah, but that’s another thing for another time)

And the bottle bursting always happens whenever I’m in a good point, as in I have a bit of motivation and my grades are good and I’m just generally not as depressed and that bone-deep, soul-deep exhaustion I feel isn’t as harrowing. It’s like the plot of life takes a sudden left turn straight off of a cliff.

The little thing this time was my flute.

Y’all know I play the flute. Y’all know I’m in marching band.

About two-ish months ago, I took my flute in for repairs, ‘cause it was garbage and didn’t play any notes, and I wanted it for marching band season so I just. Took it in for repairs, that was July? More than two months. whatever, so I got a call saying I could pick it up this week.

Went over to the shop...

Repairs came out to be $203. Like I said, garbage flute. Buuuut way back when I sent it off originally, my dad was prepared to lay down $200 so that it could be paid for -- as in, there was a pre-payment system so that if the repairs cost $200 or less, they’d already be paid for, but if it was over that amount they’d have to get customer approval before beginning transactions and whatnot.

(Of course it’d be $3 over the line... but anyways)

So I’m like, cool, I’ll just call my dad and he can pay for it and I can pick up the flute, it’ll be great, right?

Nope. (and here, if this was a verbal story, I’d pop my “p” just because of how simply and quickly he turned me down and how infuriated I am about it)

The basic rundown of what he said was that no, I wasn’t going to get my flute until next week (this week, now) and that I wouldn’t have it by Saturday (a truly important date for me b/c it was my last marching band competition, I wanted to have a playable flute for that ((and I ended up having to use my expensive ass concert flute for that event, anyways))) and that I might not even get it next (this) week because I was low on his priority list.

I probably sound like a brat but -- his daughter? Fucking low on his priority list?

He gave me a hard time when I said I should be at least second on the list, and because I’m a little shit I just took it with a tight smile and an “okay, see you next weekend, love you too, bye.”

And like -- god, he’s been doing this shit for my entire life. I guess it just took until now for me to finally see it. To say the least he’s very poor at keeping his word with me.

(Once my mom said we could go to the movies together to see Spiderman: Homecoming. She promised me we would go. Come the day of, we were running on a bit of a tight schedule due to unforeseen circumstances, and even though I told her that it was alright and we didn’t have to go see the movie, she still took us to see it because she promised. She made time for a basically three hour outing (four, I think, we may have went out to eat) because she promised me that we would go see that movie.)

((My dad’s never done anything like that. Once, when I was younger, he asked what I wanted, probably something for a birthday or Christmas or whatever, and I said I wanted to spend a day with him, just he and I, so we had one meal together at a restaurant and he took me back home. And me, being myself, I just ate that time up because I didn’t have any other times that I could say were ours, just ours. It’s... kinda sad.))

Every single time he doesn’t keep his word I get all broken up and just completely break down, full out sobs and all that jazz, because? Why? It’s the same thing that keeps happening.

I’ve been making excuses for him for years, years, my entire life. I’ve been forgiving him over and over.

Because he’s not all bad. He’s really not. (And I don’t mean it sarcastically, at least I don’t think I do, cause I’m not too sure anymore) He buys me the things I want on the appropriate dates, as in holidays and birthdays. He bought me a PS4 with the help of my brother, and he bought me FFXV (also with the help of my brother) and the like. The things I wanted in that moment, if it’s close enough to a holiday, he’ll buy.

It’s the wants, but he never participates in the needs. Never, not once.

You know, when I was younger he would always say no whenever I asked to do something with my friends on the weekends? (There’s one particularly terrible experience that happened when I dared to have an outing with my friends on a Friday without letting him know) Did you know it got to the point where my friends just stopped asking if I wanted to hang out because they knew the answer would be no?

Do you know how much that hurts?

One of my best friends (we’re estranged now) was having a birthday party for herself, and she was debating on asking me because she knew the answer would be no and she just figured that it would be better if I didn’t know about it in the first place.

I’ll never forget the look that she gave me, the pure hesitance in her whole being, when she finally told me about the party.

You know I only hear about parties second-hand now? So much time was spent, “Did you go to so-and-so’s party?”

“I didn’t even know so-and-so was having a party... how was it?”

“Ah... it was fun.”

“That’s good.”

It fucking hurts.

But does my dad care? No. (Sometimes I felt like he was doing that on purpose, just to make it easier on himself in the long run, not having to hassle, trying to cart me around to everyone’s birthday parties.)

But all that was a tangent.

I don’t think my dad knows where I want to go to college, and I frankly don’t think he cares so long as he doesn’t have to pay anything.

(My reasons for believing that? I told him a while back ((he probably doesn’t remember)) that I was going to apply to both Queens University of Charlotte and Duke University. I want to go to Queens more badly ((which requires more work on my part because I’m basically in a one-income household, so scholarships)). Duke has this financial plan where, if your family makes less than a certain amount of money yearly, the school will cover a certain amount of the tuition. At the current income level and their need-based aid, my mom wouldn’t have to pay anything because my education would be completely covered by the school. Queens has no such plan as that... but it’s my preferred school, for reasons I won’t list at the moment. When I told him these things, he basically told me to “just get into Duke,” because then he won’t have to pay anything.)

Like I said, the big things, he just doesn’t want to be involved in.

He doesn’t help my mom make payments on my car, at all. He doesn’t help with school fees, at all. (I have a fun story about that one)

When I got my permit to drive, we went driving exactly three times together (once when I first got it, and then twice when I was about to take my test for my license so he could help me parallel park). And after I got it, he called me “driving partner” ...and then hasn’t let me behind the wheel since.

My dad’s never taken off of work to support me. I’m always second place. (As a foil, my mom has taken off of work plenty of times to support me, and then worked extra to make up for it, all for me ((and bills, of course)))

I send my dad a schedule of the football games for this season, basically every time he can come see the marching band perform the show at half-time, and does he come? Not to one game. Not at all.

I didn’t tell him about competition this weekend because (after much coercing) he’s going to the game next weekend, and I knew I wouldn’t be able to get him to do something like this for two weekends in a row.

(And he told me he might not even stay to watch the show, depending on his work hours.)

When he picks me up to drive me to his house on Fridays, he won’t speak to me unless I speak first. He doesn’t ask me how my week was, nothing. The drive is just an hour of fucking silence (because he doesn’t turn the radio on with me in the car), if I don’t talk first.

He once had to pick up some food so he had a lunch for work that evening. So, with me in the car, he stopped by Chick-fil-a. (Note, I hadn’t eaten anything that day, but I hadn’t told him that.) He didn’t ask me if I wanted anything, didn’t ask me if I had eaten, didn’t even look at me. About twenty minutes down the road later, with me having to hold his food in my freaking lap because there was nowhere else to put it, he asks me if I was hungry. And when I say yes, he tells me about the leftovers in the fridge.

He makes me feel like such a nuisance whenever I even think about asking for something outside of the prompted times (again, holidays and birthdays).

I hate it so much.

And then he feels like he can still think he plays some huge part in my life when he’ll barely speak to me when we do get to see each other.

It’s like I, as a person, don’t even matter. It’s like all he wants is the final product of a “good daughter,” but not actually put in the work of being a father. (I once got a 96 or so on a test, and was very proud of it, but when I told him, his response was, “Why didn’t you get a 100?” I stopped telling him about my grades after that.)

If my school is doing a fundraiser and I ask him to buy something, no matter how politely I put it, he’ll tell me no. A random ass kid from the neighborhood can come to the door selling bottles of water and he’ll rush to get his wallet.

I just don’t get it. ...is it me?

But anyways... so yeah. My dad, as a parent, does the bare minimum.

To relate this all back to Final Fantasy XV as per this blog, I imagine Prompto’s parents were much the same as my dad.

They were never around. They never actually took care of him like parents should. He came home to an empty house most of the time.

And presumably they sent money, because Prompto ate fast food a lot but surely didn’t have a job, to at least show that they care a little bit.

They don’t want him to die.

So it’s the bare minimum... and Prompto, like me, just takes what he can because there’s so little, and makes excuses for the rest.

And knowing Prompto (especially with how he reacted to having to kill Verstael), if his parents died in the fall of Insomnia, he would be torn to pieces by it. And he might be asked why, because they were never around in the first place, and Prompto can’t explain it well (neither can I, for that matter) but there’s just something about his parents dying that’s just... killing him, too, even if they weren’t the best parents... they were still his parents.

When I was having a sobbing fit at the game immediately after the whole flute thing with my father (aka a basic thing of “am I just worthless to him?”), my friend said something to me that really stuck with me.

“You can’t choose your blood, but you can choose your family.”

And it’s not her own quote (she said as much) but it’s still true.

My dad’s related to me, and I probably love him because of that, because... he’s my dad. How can I not, even when he does make me angry sometimes?

I made my family elsewhere. I have amazing friends that support me, and I have my mom, and I have my section in the marching band and I have you guys, here on Tumblr and everyone I’ve talked to in the past that’s still with me now... I have a family. They may not all be blood, but they’re my family.

Prompto did the same thing with Noctis, Ignis, and Gladio. His parents may have been his “blood,” but he made his own family with the people that really cared about him. He chose his family.

So yeah, I don’t really know how to end this -- this was a little raw with emotion and I know I’m most likely just screaming into the void, but it’s... it’s nice to get some of it out, you know? This probably isn’t cohesive at all.... sigh.

It’s 2:30 AM now. I need sleep.

#admin note #ignore this if you like cause it's just me ranting about life and probably being a bit of a brat about it tbh #i'm just angry and drained #prompto argentum #final fantasy xv #prompto #ffxv #would i tag this under writing?#it sure is long enough to be an entire piece #it's 2625 words...yikes

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cemo-roid · 5 years ago

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The Rozes’ Shenanigans #2

(???’s POV)

With Nua’s help to unlock the folders (through hac... her ‘specialty’), the girls were able to return to the main page filled with the game folders. She also wrote the complicated, alphanumeric password in a piece of paper and plastered it on the table, in case one of them accidentally made the same mistake

And now that everything was back to normal, Mio opened the ‘training’ game Sergia had told her to play as Nua went out with Clarisse after putting the things she brought to the kitchen

“...and... that’s stage 3″

Mio heaved a deep sigh as she rapidly tapped one of the buttons on her controller, skipping through the conversations that followed after the game

The third stage of this 'training' game only had one playable 'robot' character while the enemy numbered more than 20. Each of them attacked with various range and methods, but they had more attack range compared to the playable character's. To actually finish the stage, it was necessary to move the character into the crossfire and retaliate the enemy’s attacks

According to the note that Sergia had made for her, the objective of this mission was basically to destroy as many enemy robots as possible while surviving for 6 turns to obtain the ‘mastery’

"I don't think it is even possible to finish the game,” said Juusa with an exasperated voice. “I may not know what ‘games’ are, but I think this one is incredibly hard”

“I also thought that at first... but then Sergia loaded his save file where he was on the final boss. The health bar was riddled with question marks, and it took him 2 hours to finally defeat the boss”

“...2 hours... just what kind of game is this...”

Just as Mio operated the controller to save her game, a chat notification from someone named ‘G_Raep’ popped out from the bottom of the screen. And without doing anything, the message box opened by itself, revealing its content

‘Oy, finally have some time to play your game?

After considering your preferences, I found this gem that was just released a few months ago

Tell me what you think about this later’

Following that, an underlined text in blue entered chat window, along with a pop-up that asked whether the link should be opened or not

Mio was about to close the popup and ignored the chat... but Juusa suddenly took over the controller and pressed the ‘yes’ option

“J-Juusa!?”

“What are you doing?”

“What am I... what are YOU doing!? That message was not meant for us to read, you know!?”

“Yes, I know this is something impolite and perhaps even improper to do...” a new screen popped up, showing ‘now loading’ words which spun weakly. “But are you honestly not interested in knowing what kind of person Sergia is?”

“T... that is...”

When the ‘now loading’ text disappeared, a green bar appeared at the bottom of the screen, showing that a file was being downloaded. And when it finished downloading, a prompt appeared, asking whether the file wanted to be installed or not

Needless to be said, Juusa immediately chose the option to install and open the game

“He looked like someone unmotivated to do stuff most of the time, but he was someone stubborn enough to not choose what should be the easiest solution. He was also really nosy to the point of being annoying... and crazy enough to sacrifice himself for someone he didn’t know, just to uphold his values”

“...Juusa...”

“......I owe him for bringing Karen back alive, and I want to pay him back for that. To do that, I need to know what kind of person he really is...”

“......”

“I don’t know what this ’preferences’ that guy means, but I know this is one way to find out more about Sergia,” said Juusa as she looked directly into Mio’s eyes. “That’s why... I’m doing this, even if this is impolite”

When the installation finished, the browser window disappeared and was replaced by a black screen... and a dot of light at the center. No matter how long the girls waited, the screen didn’t show any change

“...huh? Is it broken?”

When Juusa pressed the directional button, the light began to move accordingly. Realizing that she began to move the light around the screen... but she still couldn’t find anything

“...Juusa... I think... it’s better to turn off the console...”

Just as Karen said that, the light suddenly moved to the center and began to expand. It slowly grew brighter until it painted the whole screen white

And in the next moment...

“MizuPara! A Season Of Being Drenched With Water, Sweat, And Vigor!”

...the image of several girls of all ages, wearing many different types of swimsuits, could be seen on the screen

~***~

Perhaps it was because Clarisse gave the continuation on the next day, or maybe because I had seen the reaction of the girls the other day... but I could faintly figure out what happened next

Whether because their curiosity won over their sense of disgust and/or shame, the girls obviously decided to play the game... or rather, the mildly erotic visual novel that was recommended by that perverted friend of mine. Considering what they were wearing, I believed they had played for quite a while, if not all the way to completion

...I don’t know whether I should be glad that they didn’t think much about it... or worried that my image was slowly being stained by that untimely message...

“...either way, I believe those girls are also playing similar games that were also in your... fetish folder”

“I have to correct you there. I do not have this... fetish folder”

“If that is the case, then why do you put those questionable games in one folder?”

“It is PRECISELY because they are those kinds of games that I cannot put them in my normal game folders!!”

“So you do not deny the fact that you do own questionable games”

...feeling that I was somehow dancing on top of Clarisse’s palm, I decided to just shut my mouth and turn around on my bed

“...either way, Mio is still playing that ‘insanely hard game’, according to Karen, at least.” Perhaps realizing that, Clarisse only made a weak smile as she continued. “Both Juusa and Karen are also starting to help with the house chores in your stead, although the cooking was delegated to the restaurants nearby”

“What about Nua?”

“She’s currently pulling some strings... I mean, doing some shady things to make things go her way”

“...you ARE Nua’s assistant, right?”

Although the secretary-like woman made a smile as she nodded, it made me question whether she was on Nua’s side or something

“Paltry jokes aside, I do think you do not need to worry about her. If anything, you should wonder whether you are in a position to even worry about others”

“...huh? What do you mean?”

Instead of answering my question, Clarisse maintained her smile as she opened the door to my room

...and soon after that, a familiar trio entered the room, all of them obviously trying to avoid looking straight at me

“...I believe all of you had some... catching up, to do”

The moment Clarisse left the room and closed the door, I slowly began to understand how curious the girls around their ages were... and silently swore to make my ‘personal folder’ hidden from the girls

#Roze Fighters #Side Story 2

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aaronheatonwords · 7 years ago

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Yakuza 0

Sometimes a series exists on the periphery without being able to engage a certain audience. Despite being full of things that a person might like, be it intrigue or strong characters which challenge stereotypes or even just good old-fashioned dumb fun, something about it just won't grab the part of the brain that says, hey, set some time aside and enjoy this! Breaking Bad occupied this space in the part of my brain reserved for TV shows; even though the basis of the show checks every box I would want to see in a series, there's something about it that just pushes me away time and time again. At this point, it could just be the immense amount of hours that would have to be dedicated to it, and the fandom that would need to be fought off to talk candidly about it. Ultimately, though, a large part of the issue is that the zeitgeist surrounding the show has vanished. There are still plenty of people who think highly of it, but the frantic fan fervor surrounding it has come and gone.

Enter Yakuza 0. This series has existed since 2005, and as soon as it began to pick up steam in the West it has surfaced in one way or another with a very dedicated playerbase pushing for its release. Though the releases that have come to the west started out very questionably, the localization eventually found its footing and ditched English voice actors for a subtitled Japanese-only audio track. With that, the quality of the story seemed to soar and the people who loved Yakuza really loved Yakuza. A gritty crime drama full of double-crosses and intrigue, betrayal, violence and a healthy injection of Japanese culture set in a lovingly-rendered and small-scale city block; with a description like that, who could resist?

Unfortunately, me. Even though Yakuza sounds like precisely the sort of game I'd love, so much about it pushed me away. By the time it was feasible for me to acquire a copy of Yakuza in a timely manner, it had already had three prior entries. Start a series on the fourth game? No, ma'am! What about all of that rich characterization I was missing in the previous games? The hundreds of hours of ups and downs, tears, laughter, blood and sweat of our beloved cast of intrepid well-meaning criminals and their companions? Simply unthinkable.

When Yakuza 0 released in the west, it was on a wave of red-hot fans clamouring for a regular release schedule for the series. It came in hot, aided by the cheerleading of several industry figures I followed and respected very much (what's good Austin walker!), and it posed itself as a no-experience-necessary entry point to a series that had become daunting to approach in any other manner. With a few videos of breakdancing mafioso-types and some gratuitous violence, Yakuza 0 had grabbed me with its clammy hands, looked into my eyes, and ignited a fire in my loins that would make the bravest firefighter think twice about their line of work.

Starting with a loan collection spearheaded by a young Kiryu Kazama, Yakuza 0 quickly sees things go south for who would become our main man in the series. Kiryu's mark turns up dead by way of hot lead to the brain, he was the last one known to have seen the man, and on top of that the murder draws attention to a heretofore unknown piece of land that stands to dismantle a carefully-constructed real estate takeover. As a greenhorn in the yakuza, he makes an easy target for three lieutenants vying for position inside of the clan. Refusing to bend to their will begins the tale of the Dragon of Dojima's rise from lowly recruit to legend within the organisation. Parallel but in tandem with Kiryu's situation is Goro Majima, a disgraced ex-yakuza whose existence has been relegated to brown-nosing and shoe-kissing until his untold crime has been atoned for. Together, they rattle the chain of the yakuza and cement their standing.

Before you can dismantle a clan from the inside, though, you have to get used to the lifestyle. Yakuza 0 revels in its setting, filling the city of Kamurocho with bright lights and crowds and attractions galore. Despite being a PS3 game ported to the PS4, its density of crowds and detail is impressive. Trading pure scale for intimacy and detail, walking the city streets inspires a sort of awe for the times. There are restaurants of every corner, people soliciting you from doorsteps and crowds getting in your way. Even walking is a struggle as you bump and bounce off of the people strolling up and down the streets. The economic bubble of the times is played up and the revelry can be felt from the non-stop noise to the random bar hoppers you can find stumbling around and puking in alleyways. While the framerate isn't always very happy with this attention to detail, a few hours of adjustment will make it all worth it.

Yakuza 0 affords a special spotlight for the interactions between Kiryu and his friends and rivals, however. The three lieutenants who stand in Kiryu's way as he attempts to clear his name are imposing figures, despite mostly operating from the shadows. Their faces are rendered in face-punchingly beautiful detail, every crow's foot and furrow present during close-ups and fights. With such expressive and detailed faces, it makes it incredibly easy to get lost in the situations they present to Kiryu as he fights his way through his predicaments.

On that note, fight you do! At such a young age, we get to see Kiryu at his meanest and most impulsive, and Majima as he falls back into his scrappy ways. The game starts with two beatings, one of a group of hooligans and one of a couple of (presumably) innocent drunks. As you fight, your fists glow with intensity, called Heat, and you can use it to unleash brutal power moves. Combat itself is a basic brawler with simple punches, kicks and grabs at your disposal supplemented by the ability to pick up and swing a variety of environmental items. You can brandish bats, swords, trash cans and benches, motorbikes and a number of other ridiculous objects as you throw down in the streets. The Heat moves are what serves to make the combat stand out, however. Frankly, they're just rude. Slamming heads in car doors, shaking salt into eyeballs, throwing people into rivers, breaking arms and legs and smashing faces into brick walls all while yen explodes out of the poor souls caught between your knuckles and the ground makes for an empowering (and sometimes revolting) combat system.

Majima and Kiryu are capable of more than just busting skulls, though, as good as they are at it. Between story missions and fist fights are a staggering amount of side quests. Some are happened upon by accident, some are brought on by intentionally seeking things out, but all of them are worth at least a smile and many more are worth some genuine laughter. A big thumbs up goes out to the localization team, of course, but the bulk of the work must have been done by the original writers. Though this game has such a self-serious and intense story, the side quests offer a reprieve from the emotional tax that the main story levies from the player. In the span of an hour, you can go from helping break up a panty-selling ring to break-dancing with a world-famous pop star to helping a reporter infiltrate a weapons-trading ring to helping a poor soul sell some mushrooms. No, like mushrooms. Like really mushrooms. Actual cooking mushrooms. Majima and Kiryu, who are generally straightforward and ambitious characters, are given a chance to revel in silliness and break character in a way that lets both the players and the story have room to breathe and decompress between intense beats.

As fun as the world is to exist in and as well-detailed as the city is, it can sometimes lead to disappointment. There is so much to see that there's a compulsion to attempt to take part in everything, which often leads to a feeling of having hit a dead end. The mini-map and map denote which buildings have interactions built into them, but visually there are almost no differences between buildings which house a minigame or unique characters and buildings that are simply set dressing. Without a clear visual tell, it can lead to situations where an NPC asking for your business is nothing more than audiovisual noise, rather than the potential sidequest or event that they seemed to be setting themselves up as. Even towards the end of the game, I was hoping for more of the city of open itself up to me, in density rather than pure size. Unfortunately the two playable areas don't change very much, aside from the occasional story beat forcing the player down a predetermined path. The city feels more alive than most open worlds accomplish in their entire maps, but it can often lead to disappointment when trying to enjoy the area.

The biggest issue with the game is how ancillary Majima's story feels in comparison to Kiryu's. Kiryu serves as the driving force and heart of the game, being the central figure that the Yakuza are trying to track down and the de-facto lead of the series. He is driven, determined, and unafraid of the threats on his life in a way that gives his story an almost unstoppable sense of momentum. Majima, on the other hand, feels as if he's constantly being played by other forces in the story. While he is a far cry from Kiryu in the sense that he's more willing to get his hands dirty and engage in foul play, his character feels somewhat caught in the currents of the story instead of a force shaping the events. While Majima's story is well-written, I found myself dying to get back to Kiryu nearly every time Majima came into play. There is plenty of ridiculousness to be had with Majima and Osaka is a fun playground to exist in, but without a connection to him I found myself more curious about the opposing half of the story. This may come own to preference, but Kiryu's story felt the stronger of the two by a significant margin.

After years and years of holding out on the series, Yakuza 0 feels like the perfect point for newcomers to jump in. Even though it's full of nods to the later games (even as a newcomer, they feel fairly obvious), none of it feels obtuse or played up in such a way that new players will feel left out. Kiryu and Majima are introduced and set up with lots of room to grow, and indeed do change and adapt over the course of the game. While anyone with knowledge of later games will have a decent idea of where things will end, the journey of getting to that point is consistently gripping and dripping with dramatic tension that few other games even approach. The city clocks of Kamurocho and Osaka make for very beautiful and intricate locales, even if they do sometimes feel slightly restricted. For lovers of crime dramas and brawlers, for those who can sink into a well-realized space and everyone who loves Japanese culture and history, Yakuza 0 is a treat.

#yakuza 0 #video games #japanese #rpg #brawler #action #sim #ps3 #ps4 #kazuma kiryu #majima goro #2017 #sega #mr shakedown

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ianmrid · 7 years ago

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...But You Still Gotta Catch ‘em All...

One thing that Generation One didn’t have much of was a post-game. Once you completed the main story there wasn’t much to do aside from heading to the newly accessible Cerulean Cave to catch Mewtwo and finish off your Pokédex.

Generation Two improves on this in a huge way.

One of the reasons it is taking me rather a long time to complete the all the Gen2 games, is that once you finish your journey around Johto, the option becomes available to hop on a boat and travel back to Kanto - the setting for Generation One. It turns out that Kanto and Johto are situated right next to each other and in fact the Indigo Plateau, where you battle the Elite Four and the current champion, is the same place in both generations.

This is a huge expansion, as it is essentially an entire second game to play. It is fantastic fun, giving you the chance to visit all the old areas and challenge your Kanto favourites. Misty, Brock, Lt. Surge, Sabrina, and almost all of the rest return, giving you another eight gym badges to collect, giving a total of sixteen across both regions. However, not everything is the same as when you left it.

In the two years since you battled your way around Kanto in Gen1, the Elite Four have some new membership - most notably the Fuschia City gym leader, Koga, who has been promoted, leaving his former gym in the charge of his daughter, Janine. If you defeat the Elite Four this time around, you will find that Lance, formerly of the Kanto Elite Four, is now the champion, ready to challenge you with his insanely powerful (mostly) Dragon-type team.

There have been some geographical changes too. A huge volcanic eruption has wiped out Cinnabar Island, destroying the Pokémon Mansion - which has housed the journals explaining how Mewtwo was cloned from Mew - and the Pokémon Lab - which was where fossils could be resurrected into Kabuto, Omanyte, and Aerodactyl. The Pokémon Gym on this island has also been destroyed and Blaine is forced to operate out of a small cave in the Seafoam Islands. There is also no trace of Mewtwo in the Cerulean Cave, or any of the Legendary Birds; Articuno, Zapdos, or Moltres.

With Team Rocket disbanded, the Celedon Game Corner now operates as a legitimate business and not a front for Team Rocket’s secret HQ and, more importantly, the Viridian City gym is no longer run by Giovanni, the erstwhile leader of Team Rocket. Instead, new the gym leader turns out to be Gary Motherfucking Oak! Gary, or rather Blue as he is known, since it was default name of your rival in the Gen1 games, still has an incredibly strong and well-balanced team, that doesn’t rely on a single type. It was a genuine surprise to see him turn up in this way and, although he seems a bit more mature, it was as satisfying as ever to defeat him.

So Blue is back, but what about Red? Well, the protagonist and playable character from Gen1 hasn’t been seen since heading off on journey after becoming champion. Even when you check with his Mum in Pallet Town, she doesn’t know where he is. This sounds like a mystery for you to solve! To be fair, it isn’t the hardest riddle in the world as there is only one area that you haven’t yet visited: Mount Silver, the mysterious mountain that lies between Kanto and Johto, which is home to many high-level pokémon. Previously, this means the area has been deemed ‘too dangerous’ by Professor Oak (yes, he is also still knocking around), but after earning your sixteenth gym badge, courtesy of defeating Blue, Oak relents and opens up the path to Mount Silver. Once there, is you make your way through caves inside and up to the summit, there is a mysterious and silent figure stood atop the peak in the snow. It’s Red!

Wordlessly he challenges you and the resulting battle is by far the hardest and most intense in any of the Pokémon games that I have played to date. Red has all three fully evolved Kanto starter pokémon - Venusaur, Charizard, and Blastoise - all at level 77, a level 73 Espeon, a level 75 Snorlax, and a Pikachu (of course) at level 88(!).

None of Red’s pokémon are exactly easy to defeat, but his damn Snorlax and Espeon really gave me problems on every encounter, especially the Snorlax with it’s ability to REST away any damage or status condition whilst using SNORE to attack while sleeping. Fortunately the two new types in Gen2 - Dark and Steel - proved invaluable, with my Dark-types giving some immunity from Espeon and my Steel-types able to withstand Snorlax’s Normal-type moves. Even so, it was incredibly close on all three occasions that I faced Red, with the battles feeling really epic in a way that no battle in any game had before. Once defeated Red vanishes again - although you can rematch against him if you beat the Elite Four again.

I really love the post-game in Generation 2 as it helps to continue the world building that I really enjoy. It is great to see how old characters are doing, how their teams have changed (Misty has acquired a Golduck, a Lapras, and a Quagsire), and how their pokémon have evolved (Brock’s Geodude is now a Graveller). And the cherry on top is the battle against Red. This is definitely the most exciting and challenging pokémon battle I have to date and it’s genuinely thrilling to fight against yourself from the first games, using some of the most iconic pokémon available, and even more thrilling to take him down.

So, I’ve finally completed all three Generation Two games and vanquished Red - essentially the final boss - on each occasion. My Pokédex is looking pretty full, but there are still a few gaps left in it. It’s time to close them out - how hard can that be? Right?

#pokemon #pokemon playthrough #e plays pokemon #nintendo #game freak #Pokemon Crystal

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