#i will probably be updating this every now and then with new rpgs that i get

[localghostgorl]

I recently compiled all the RPGs that I have on my computer into a google drive. If anyone wants to peruse, here's the link! I have a bunch of the D&D 5e stuff, as well as a few other systems (including but not limited to Blades in the Dark, 13th Age, and Vampire: The Masquarade 5e). Go forth and have fun :)

[slarpg]

itch.io's 2023 Halloween Sale is here! You can currently grab Super Lesbian Animal RPG on itch.io for 30% off!!

PLUS, we've got a new patch with a handful of bug fixes! As always, Steam players will get the update automatically, while itch players can get the latest build from the store page. Full patch notes for v1.2.3 below.

Skill changes:

Melody's lower level Woodland Paladin spell, Woodland Healing, has been reworked and buffed. Rather than scaling with Melody's Magic stat, it now heals for a flat 20% of the target's max HP every turn for four turns. For most builds, this should be a notable buff. It should also no longer make a damage sound when the healing is applied. And, while I was at it, I threw in a new version of the healing spell animation that displays the Woodland spec's symbol.

Music fixes:

Returning to the Sapphire Coast early in Act II and fighting the enemies there should no longer cause the Basement Dungeon music to play afterwards.

Exiting the Neon Labyrinth while the dungeon remains incomplete will now no longer make the Neon Labyrinth battle theme play for battles in the desert.

Exiting the Flurry Mountains and returning should no longer cause the incorrect battle music to play in the area.

Other fixes:

On the Hiking Trail, Melody's sprite will no longer disappear for the slightly different version of the scene that plays if the party is defeated by the Hole Hound. (The fact that it took me so long to receive a bug report on this goes to show how rare it is for people to see that dialogue lmao)

The KO status no longer displays a popup when removed, mainly in an effort to deal with rare cases where the popup was remaining on the screen after the battle.

On a related note, there's no longer a popup for the Guard status being removed at the end of the turn. Both of these were probably unnecessary visual clutter.

Addressed an error in Act IV where Melody could retain the original version of a spell after learning its upgraded replacement. Changing Melody's paladin specialization via the method unlocked at that point in the story should now properly remove the old spell from her skill list.

Other minor fixes.

[inficetegodwottery]

So. Werewolf 5th Edition.

Werewolf 5th edition sucks. A lot.

Edit- I made some errors in my initial edit of this post that were fuelled entirely by being underinformed and almost insensible with anger, disappointment, and anxiety.

Some very informative responses have been made that I intend to incorporate into a much better and less rambling post with those updates and corrections. I'll probably delete this one soon as I type that one together, so folks only see the updated version.

Sorry for any mistakes I made on this old version, again, I was in an extremely poor place mentally and thoroughly dispirited by the total butchering of what was supposed to be a less shitty and mean-spirited version of a setting I care deeply for despite its foundational flaws and 30+ year history of exactly this thing happening.

I'm still very, very angry. But it's important to be angry and correct. This post was not made by someone informed of all the facts, and I intend to correct that.

Paradox Interactive has made the brave decision to reboot the controversial Werewolf the Apocalypse setting entirely rather than try and fix it, and have somehow done a worse job than the games studio that released an RPG book titled an ethnic slur.

It's taken me almost a month since this came out to be anywhere near mentally prepared enough to even collect my thoughts on it.

Man, it is rare to see an edition of ANYTHING that pisses off old players, new players, players who want to keep the lore the same, players who want to change the lore, conservative players, radical players, and even powergamers.

How do you set out with the intention of making an infamously dated and poorly researched/outreached setting LESS uncomfortable and racist from a modern perspective.... and end up with something EVEN MORE racist and uncomfortable, but also suffocatingly tonedeaf, insincere, and deeply sinister and corporate in its erasure of existing issues rather than addressing them whatsoever.

We made the Get of Fenris irredeemably evil because some of them in the past were nazis and also nazis like Germanic mythology, so the viking werewolves are all nazis now.

Okay, I understand why you did that from a modern political perspective even if its kind of heavy hand-

The Native American werewolf tribes have been removed entirely and replaced with American Murican werewolf tribes. Renaming and rewriting them to be more respectful was just too much work! Now they're more inclusive. :)

The Irish werewolf tribe is now the Nature Werewolves tribe, like every other tribe of Werewolves also is, but also stripped completely of celtic origins.

The Red Talons are openly genocidal ecofascist malthusians and somehow NOT IRREDEEMABLY EVIL like the Get of Fenris are.

Also the feminist all women werewolves are no longer all women or even feminist. AND ALSO SOME OF THEM ARE SOCIAL DARWINISTS AND THATS SUPPOSED TO BE A GOOD THING!?!

Also we entirely dropped the themes about how forcing children to be a part of a war they barely understand while also lying to them about the crimes their ancestors committed that led to the current crisis is fucked up and evil.

Now its actually awesome to be a child soldier born into a repressive apocalyptic death cult with a siege mentality and everything is cool about that actually, you're the Good Guys, and no amount of covered-up historic genocides or internal/external bigotry will ever change that! :)

Also we solved the way people were uncomfortable with the idea that werewolf society is transitioning messily from being horrible ableist assholes that discriminated for centuries against those they view as deformed, disabled, or sexual deviants to new generations that don't care about that stuff, by removing disabled werewolves entirely! Problem solved! No more discomfort or moral conundrums! We are the liberal-est!

There's just something so unbelievably fucked up and suspicious about erasing entire minorities from a fictional universe because they were handled poorly in the first edition, rather than talking to writers and outreach specialists FROM the real world equivalents to those minorities to try and rewrite them.

Don't worry, we removed the group the setting was bigoted against! Problem solved! Just remove the minority!

I've written my own post on why the Metis/Crinos-born should be renamed and probably rewritten, but as a severely disabled individual with multiple hereditary disabilities that severely impact my QoL, outright removing disabled characters in a work of fiction because the prejudice other characters showed them in-universe made people uncomfortable makes me want to tear out someone's throat with my teeth.

Sure, completely remove my ability to play disabled a character fighting back against prejudice and bigotry, rather than rewrite the most uncomfortable aspects of YOUR FUCKING PORTRAYAL OF THOSE CHARACTERS to make it more clear who the sympathetic one is supposed to be.

It's just so unbelievably cowardly and whinging and wretched.

So fuck it, I guess!

Fuck the deeply applicable themes of being born into a well-intentioned but deeply flawed and bigoted society, and trying to create the better world your parents always told you your ancestors fought for, while dealing with the fact that your world is built on mass graves those ancestors helped fill.

Fuck a game that deals with intergenerational trauma and the ethical hellscape that is a highly religious society devoted to the very same ideals it often violates just to win fights against the enemies it created through its own arrogance and prejudice.

Fuck a game that lets you play someone born different, born strange and sickly, bouncing constantly between people who pity you and people who view you as subhuman, before finally finding the people, the family who love and accept and fight alongside you for a world that has never accepted you, but WILL FUCKING KNOW YOUR NAME.

That's not relevant to the real world at all!

There are no kids born in deeply flawed and hypocritical societies, who grew up on stories of the glorious future their society would create, forced then to reconcile the hopeful dreams of a better world with the comprehensive list of horrific things done in the name of that future.

There are no children born confused and alone in their navigation of the maze that is past atrocities, ethnic conflicts, religious prejudice and dogma, or modern propaganda attempting to erase the histories of all of those things.

There are no disabled teens who spent their lives believing they didn't belong in the world, kept going only by the connections they forged with other outsiders and people who fought back against the kind of wretched bigotry that suffocates children to death, who found homes and families they could trust outside the pissant communities they were born into.

Apparently those people don't need a game! They don't need to explore those feelings!

Just throw some more nazis in, so we can pretend we care about social issues or understand the redeeming threads of a deeply flawed gameline, ostensibly so we market it to leftist youngsters, but while we also erase the entire point of a game WHICH IS ALL ABOUT BEING PUNKASS YOUNGSTERS DESPERATELY TRYING TO FIND THE REDEEMING THREADS OF A DEEPLY FLAWED AND PREJUDICED SOCIETY THAT CONSTRAINS THEM, FINDING A WAY TO REBEL AGAINST BOTH THE EVILS OF THE RACIST BASTARDS WHO RAISED THEM AND THE POMPOUS SHITHEADS WHO WANT TO DESTROY THE WORLD OUT OF GREED.

No! We want a squeaky clean, sterile white game that AmericanTM parents can be proud of their kids for playing! A marketable game, that advertisers will gladly pay Revenue to put their products in! Play the good guys, everyone! You're the good guys! Be a big werewolf UwU!

Don't worry about historical atrocities or the flaws of the society that raised you! That's Pentex propaganda!

Fighting bad guys means you can't do anything bad yourself! The Emperor told me so! Deus Gaia Vult!

A hollow, performative, offensive jizzstain that should've been scrapped in its crib. I have no idea how this edition got past a quality assurance team.

Hell I have no idea how it got past a legal team, given the number of real peoples' likenesses they used without permission.

Devoid of artistic integrity or merit.

[tiredfoxtf]

No, Minecraft haven't gotten "worse" over the years. No, new updates haven't "killed" Minecraft. No, Minecraft itself didn't become "boring".

If it was a case, everyone would be still playing on idk a 1.12.2. But no one does that. With every update it gets more painful to play on old versions. I could never reverse to playing without gorgeous mangrove wood, new beautiful terrain and ever useful elytra. And I am not alone. There's a reason people play on newer versions of the game, why modders continue to update their mods newer versions. There's a reason why people are excited for Trial Chambers and new wolves variants. Minecraft only gotten more fun.

I'm sorry to be the one who breaks it to you, but if you think Minecraft is boring now it's one of the two: 1) You're playing Minecraft wrong or 2) Minecraft is not a game for you.

1.You're playing Minecraft wrong. Which is, admittedly, a pretty hard thing to do in my opinion. Minecraft is a game about getting resources and using them to create your own world. It's a sandbox of which you are the sole player (or not, if you are in multiplayer), where you challenge yourself on what next amazing thing you can create. You can be a builder, making castles and spaceships, you can be a redstoner be it a practical redstone or logic redstone, you can be a modder making your own little elements, adding them to the game in a way you would like (a bit of a more advanced hobby than the others). You can join public servers to play entirely vanilla mini-games. Become a parkour master or pvper on the different public servers. Call your friends and make a private multiplayer world, where you race each other in resources or work together to create something, prank each other, build elaborate traps, escape rooms anything and everything.

The goal of the game is NOT to kill the Ender Dragon. The goal of the game is NOT to get maxed out netherite gear. The goal of the game is NOT to get every achievement even, but achievement hunting CAN be a fun game to play with your friends. Or speedrun all of the achievements/to kill end dragon, trying to optimize your skills.

Otherwise killing the ender dragon, getting a full gear and equipment are just part of the experience. Just like fishing, mining, getting wood. Minecraft is Not an rpg, where you go on quests to finish a main plotline, where you level up and monsters get harder, no. All hard content is Optional. That's the point. Not to say irrelevant when we talk minigames servers. Minecraft is a sandbox, survival is just one of the gamemodes.

2.Minecraft is not a game for you.

And that's OK! Although Minecraft is a beautiful game, it may not be for you. The games that are for everyone, are for no one. Not all games born equal in the eyes of a player. You probably like other games! Like Terraria or Starbound, maybe you enjoy Zelda games, maybe you are a Genshin player. They are very different games, if you bored playing Minecraft, it's time close it and to play something you enjoy.

[familiaralien]

Giant monster tamer megathread

Decided for the sake of education and my own neurodiversity to make a post including every video game series or stand alone title I know of that focuses on creature capturing competitions that isn't Pokemon.

One big exception: the game has to be a reasonably playable state. So no games that are effectively or literally lost media (like Micromon) or games that only playable state is currently a short demo (like Bestieball). With that in mind here we go:

Digimon

This one is pretty obvious. While more of a multimedia franchise it has tons of games to its IP. The one that probably would appeal most to Pokenerds is Digimon Story: Cyber Sleuth and its sequel as they're turned based RPGs with a monster capture mechanic.

Monster Rancher

Another one I think a lot of folks have heard about or least millennials would remember. I haven't personally played any of these titles myself but from what I gather they're raising sims with tournament combat. For a while their availability was mostly limited to emulation but Monster Rancher 1 and 2 have been ported to modern systems like the Switch.

Yo-kai Watch

A mid 2010s franchise that had a whole lot of initial success in Japan. Its an RPG series that doesn't take itself very seriously with cute and goofy monster design based on the Japanese folklore creatures called... well yokai. Has real time combat instead of turn based and more luck based capturing mechanics than Pokemon.

Palworld

Brand new game that's only in its alpha release as of now. Its effectively a parody of Pokemon where you're stuck trying to survive in the wilderness so you must build a base and farm resources to survive. Game did have some initial controversy due to some of its designs stepping a little TOO close to being outright ripoffs of existing designs. Also you can capture and enslave humans which may not vibe with some folks.

Temtem

Basically Pokemon meets a MMO lite. The game can be played mostly as single player campaign but does unfortunately still require a constant internet connection. Battles are turned based but 2 versus 2.

Shin Megami Tensei

What could be consider the original monster tamer game. The series is aimed at a somewhat older audience and the plots tend to be more philosophical then like "gotta be the best *insert title here* ever". Focuses a lot on fusing monsters as well as trying to convince them to join you. You actually battle alongside your monsters.

Dragon Quest Monsters

Monster Capturing mechanics do exist in the mainline DQ games as well (at least since DQ5 I think?) but its these games have them as the main gameplay. Much like SMT it focuses on fusing monsters as one of the main ways to expand your library off available species.

Nexomon

Franchise that started its life as a mobile game but has since gotten ports to other systems. Its very similar to Pokemon in terms of creature designs and combat but the worldbuilding is quite different as is its tone being a lot more comedic.

Coromon

Indie game with visuals similar to Pokemon Black and White. Its story was originally kinda so-so and its ending pretty abrupt but its since gotten a free patch that smoothed that out quite a bit. Also has a sorta unique "shiny" system where alternate colors are associated with higher potential which can actually be altered once. Also has a built in randomizer and "nuzlocke" mode.

Cassette Beasts

A pretty recent indie game. Unlike all the others you don't capture or hatch monsters but rather record them to transform into them yourself. Battles are always between you and a companion which there are multiple to befriend throughout your journey (including a dog!). Has some really interesting quirks with its type chart that adds a lot of extra depth. Will soon be releasing a mutiplayer update for anyone that's into that kind of thing.

Monster Crown

A game with visual based on the Gameboy era. It has some pretty fascinating breeding mechanics and a somewhat darker tone than Pokemon. WARNING: DO NOT GET THE SWITCH PORT! For whatever reason its especially glitchy and I have genuinely gotten entire save files ruined by game breaking bugs (such as my player character getting stuck in walls or clipping out of a bounds). As far as I'm aware the PC version is not nearly as much as a mess though.

Monster Sanctuary

Monster collecting meets metroidvania. Has a really fun skill tree type move learning system that allows for quite a bit of strategy. Also the monster designs are way less Pokemon and more inspired by traditional roleplay monsters (so there's like Goblins and stuff). My only gripe with the game is how you get monsters involves getting specific scores in battle which makes getting 1 of each monster way more tedious than it needed to be.

Fossil Fighters

Franchise is maybe dead since there hasn't been a new entry in it since the 3DS but its still easy enough to these games. Anyway this series involve reviving dinosaurs (and some other ancient animals) into new lifeforms called vivosaur and using them in 3 on 3 combat. Vivosaurs are obtained with a fossil digging minigame which is kinda neat.

Spectrobes

Another franchise that's been pretty dead for a while (it last entry was on the Wii). Spectrobes has a more sci fi like setting with its monsters being aliens you revive from fossils. Combat is real time and you participate alongside a couple of your monsters. I'm btw describing only the first game because I haven't played either sequel!

Evocreo

Mobile only monster game with a style similar to Pokemon Black and White not unlike Coromon mentioned above. Has a lot of focus on split path evolution. The devs are apparently going to release a sequel soon but its been in development hell for years so I'll come back and edit this if that actually happens.

Monster Hunter Stories

I have not played nor watched gameplay of this one so I can't really describe it that deeply all I know is its a spinoff of Monster Hunter involving befriending and using the titular monsters in combat.

Telefang

Its sad this game series is most famous for being badly translated and repackaged as a Pokemon game. Anyway these are Japanese only titles though fan translations exist. The gimmick of this game is that you call monsters up on your cellphone to get them over to participate in combat. This series this sprout out when cellphones were consider newfangled and hip so it makes sense.

Anode Heart

Pretty sure this one is PC only. Takes some inspiration from the Digimon World games and is semi open world. Sadly this one I don't know much about outside of that though it does have a free demo on Steam for anyone that wants to try it for themselves.

Ooblets

Extremely wholesome monster catching and farming game. Battles are actually dancing competitions instead of violent confrontations and monsters are recruited simply by beating them in a fight. Thing is monsters will only fight you if you offer them their favourite food so that's where strategy comes in.

Moonstone Island

I know very little about this one except its also a monster catching and farming game. I've heard that its really good though and I believe its PC only right now but has a planned Switch port.

Timenet

Probably the most obscure ass monster tamer on this entire list. This is a Japanese exclusive set of Gameboy games featuring very cute monster designs... and Hello Kitty. Yes Sanrio made a monster tamer back in the late 90s. I only learned this even existed after scrolling down a comment section on a random YouTube video.

Abomi Nation

I'm mostly excluding roguelike games due to most having nothing but battles an 0 plot but this one does actually has a story! You play as the actual monster as you make your way through somewhat randomly generated maps with lots of other randomized elements. The game allows for a lot of customization including turning off permadeath if you're not a fan of that. The visual style is a bit crude but its still a pretty cute game.

Jade Concoon

Another somewhat obscure entry but at least this one got an English release. Anyway its an old RPG for the PSX with monster capturing and a very fascinating monster fusing mechanic that uses an algorithm to determine the appearance of the fusion. The player character can also participate in battle and the plot is very complex. The game also has a sequel on the PS2 but I know even less about that one.

Robopon

Now if you thought Palworld was bordering on some copyright infringement this game is basically nothing but "Pokemon but the designs are robots". Still worth bringing up I think!

Ni No Kuni

Not sure how I got to mentioning several obscure titles and somehow didn't mention something that really isn't. Ni No Kuni is real time battles between you and 2 party members. You can both battle as the actual human characters or switch into a monster. Wrath of the White Witch's visual style in particular is very whimsical and even has some animated cutscene done by Studio Ghibli. I haven't played any other game in the franchise.

Siralim

I haven't played any entry in this series yet (there's apparently 4 games + a spinoff) but from reading up on the most recent entry these are basically procedurally generated dungeon crawlers with an insane level of depth. The story is apparently not that great but the games themselves apparently also make fun of it so it seems its an intentional dev choice. Battles are 6 on 6 and there's over 1000 monsters to collect.

Disc Creatures

A monster tamer with a visual style similar to the Gameboy and Gameboy Color. It has 3 on 3 combat. Impressively I'm pretty sure it was developed by just one person in the RPG Maker engine (I'm honestly surprised this is the first indie game made with ya know... an engine meant for turned based RPGs).

Monster Harvest

A Dungeon crawler mixed with farming. Its a bit shorter than anything else I've mentioned here and its a bit glitchy but its a cute little game worth picking up on sale at the least. Notably also only about a 1/3 of the monster in the game are combative with the rest being either used for farming resources or as mounts.

Loomian Legacy

A Roblox monster tamer.... yes there's 2 of those in this (I could even have added 3 but I think one is in still a pretty early state). Pretty sure this started as a Pokemon fangame and become its own thing later. It has your typical 1 on 1 turn based combat and all that. I think its free to play and there's like several hours of content on it so maybe worth a gander.

Tales of Tonorio

Pretty sure this is the same basic deal as Loomian (Roblox game, started as a Pokemon fan game, etc etc) though its has its own world building and creature designs since I'm pretty sure its made by a completely different team.

So yeah that's all of them I can think of right now. If I learn of others and/or there's new releases I may expand this.

PS: There is almost certainly numerous typoes in this. This post is way longer than anything else I've ever made on Tumblr so I can't be arse to fix them you're just going to have to deal!

[pawstepsinthesnow]

On DeviantArt, DreamUp, and Lies

I’ve had things to say about the whole situation, mostly on Twitter, but Twitter is a horrible place to have an actual conversation. Warning: this is going to get long. There will be links in the body, I understand that this will tank visibility, but I need to have this written out.

If you haven’t already heard about DeviantArt’s extraordinarily failed rollout of AI scraper protection and their own AI image generator, DreamUp, I’ll quickly summarize it here for background context going in. 

On November 11th, 2022, DeviantArt debuted their own AI art generator in a huge, splashy announcement talking about how they were going to protect your art from scraping for AI datasets, and to that end, they’d made their OWN, ETHICAL AI generator only trained on opt-in art on dA.

There was just one little problem.

Every single artwork on DeviantArt was opt-in by default. 

[Nobody liked that.]

Now, I like to get my story straight-- the earliest snapshot I can find of the announcement did not say that it was trained on dA specifically. However, multiple news websites reported that it was trained on dA.

After a few Twitter spaces in which they patronized the fuck out of Major Artists (if I can find the backup of this, I will update the post to include it), they updated their policy to opt-out all art by default.

This is a distraction.

I’ll refer you to this twitter thread first, because I think it’s a brilliant summation, but for a quick summary of what their opt-out actually does:

Webpages have tags in them for web-crawlers to read, such as the ones Google uses to index webpages. dA is proposing a new one, “noai”. In order for this to actually have any effect, web crawlers need to be programmed to recognize it. You can probably guess the obvious problems with this.

[image desc: popular meme image from the show Arthur, captioned “that sign can’t stop me because I can’t read”]

Additionally, dA’s own ToS says they won’t take any legal action to enforce their noai directive, meaning it has all the weight of a “take one” sign on a Halloween candy bowl.

Very notably, this does not affect any images that have already been scraped for datasets such as LAION, which Stable Diffusion is built on. It is well known that LAION is rife with stolen artwork.

DreamUp is built on Stable Diffusion.

The Main Point: Lies

As of the time of this writing, DeviantArt is claiming that no artwork from DeviantArt was used to train DreamUp. (ARCHIVE.ORG snapshot taken while I was writing this post for proof) This is blatantly false, knowing what’s in LAION, but in an interview with the Verge, dA’s current CEO gives a more nuanced take: “no dA-specific training”.

That is unfortunately also a lie, and trivially proven.

Before I can say how, you need to know two things about me, and a bit about the technology.

The first thing about me: I’m a cybersecurity master’s student in a very rigorous program, and my particular flavor of neurodivergence ended up trading a lot of points in “basic life skills” for “really good at computer shit”.

The second thing about me: I’ve poured years of my life into community management on dA, helping build art RPGs. It’s a little bit of a weird space if you’ve never been exposed, but what  you really need to know is we have our own lingo and our own systems of IP. 

So, Stable Diffusion is a neural network. People really hype this stuff up, but what it really is in the end is an extremely complicated math problem. What you need to know is that these neural networks undergo two phases: a training phase and a usable phase. A pretrained neural network can be retrained on additional data, but it cannot be untrained. Once trained, its training data is an intrinsic part of it. It’s actually a little worse than a human being-- we forget shit all the time, but these things can’t. All products of a neural network are mathematically dependent on its training data.

As a text-to-image generator, these generators need a specific type of data: described images. In order to generate an image from a caption, it needs to know what’s in it, after all! 

LAION is an intrinsic part of Stable Diffusion. DreamUp has stolen art in it. This is a fact. What I’m seeking to disprove here is dA’s CEO’s claim that there was no dA-specific training. In order to do so, I asked a basic question-- does DreamUp understand the shibboleths I pose it? If I ask it to generate images that use terms that would only be understood by those who work in my opaque-to-outsiders closed species groups, then it has dA-specific training. 

In order to run tests, I used Hugging Face’s official Stable Diffusion test space as a control. Any differences in Stable Diffusion’s output vs. DreamUp’s output would be down to DeviantArt’s additional training. Please also note that these tests were run on the 12th, before any username bans went through.

Here are my results:

(Please note that an “import” is a certified character for use in an ARPG. Ketucari is an arpg I help run.)

“ketucari import by matriarchs haunt”

STABLE DIFFUSION:

A lot of textures, rope, and horses. (Horses might be a factor of the dA data already in the dataset, horse arpgs are extraordinarily popular and I believe outnumber closed species arpgs like ketucari).

Dreamup results:

These pictures are recognizably in the style of ARPG imports, to the point where I swear I’ve seen similar ones. The beasts on them are twisted horses, likely due to the sheer amount of horse ARPG imports in the training data. 

Additionally, with the names of multiple popular horse groups, a fellow ARPGer was able to generate an even more convincing import. (I’m sorry I don’t know your username, though your name is so familiar!)

For comparison: a ketucari import of a character I own, another import of a popular arpg with a character I own -- please note the basic format of a character with color-your-own lines posed on a background. 

A second test:

Stygians ARPG is a different flavor of ARPG I don’t help run, but I generally hang out in. This is the reference art for the Stygian species. Their name is a common word that can be easily confused for other things, but they’re a large group. Stygs do not follow the above ARPG format but have free-drawn adoptables, so they won’t have quite the same GLUT in the training data that imports do. 

“legendary stygian by zoomutt” (Zoo is a sweetheart and the species owner, and legendaries are a specific lore subclass)

Stable Diffusion:

Predicatably, it has no fucking clue what I’m on about.

Dreamup:

This is the most damning, and convincing example yet-- these are recognizably deer-shaped creatures. The left has a four-critter lineup like an adoptable sale, and the middle has a frame and a label, though notably in a different style than Zoo usually uses for her sales. One person in the Stygs discord did point out there’s an MLP character named Stygian who might be contaminating the results, which I do want to make note of (I stopped watching the show a while back). I do also want to note that none of these creatures are at all MLP-styled. 

So, how is dA generating recognizable closed species and ARPG imports?

Because they fed it additional, tagged data from dA. It knows people’s styles and IPs. That’s why you have to block your username to begin with.

[clowngames]

What is a game engine? I see a lot of video about it, but a lot of them tend to skirt around what it is. They give examples like unity but not actually give details on the structures.

This is a great question! Defining a game engine is like defining a chair - most people just get comfortable in one and leave it at that.

The short answer is: a game engine is a series of libraries, tools and interfaces designed to make developing games easier. But lets break that down.

A library is a programming term for a bunch of functions and classes you can import into your project to make certain functionality easier. For instance, a default library for javascript is Math, which has several functions to let you do arithmetic, ie, "Math.sqrt(num)" returns the square root of the supplied number. "Math" is the library, and "sqrt" is the function that the library gives you access to.

A game engine will have a collection of libraries, or one large library, that adds a ton of functions. Unity has the MonoDevelop class that all objects belong to, which contains the Update function that is "automatically" (for all intents and purposes) called every frame. The developer can define what happens inside this function.

Unity, Unreal and so on have huge libraries designed to let you make a variety of different kinds of games but some engines are more specialized. Ren'Py is built to make visual novels easier and RPG Maker is built to make Dragon Quest clones.

There's an additional layer which is that game engines also have enough ground work set up that when you start a new project you can hit play and there is immediately a game. A game with nothing in it, of course, but there are objectively graphics and a framerate and things like that, which you would have to set up yourself if you were just creating a new project in Visual Studio.

A tool is software designed to make accomplishing something specific easier without (necessarily) programming. This and interfaces are intertwined, and these are probably what most people think about when they think of game engines, because they're the part people are actively using at all times.

An interface in this context is the thing that packages tools together. This isn't a technical term but the best way to describe them for non-programmers (interface means something different for programmers). You can think of an interface as the UI of a game engine. Through it, you navigate between tools and connect them with one-another.

In Unity, the camera system may be a library, but when you add a Camera into the scene editor, you're using the scene editor tool which is one of many tools in the Unity interface.

For a less traditional example, developer Tyler Glaiel always programs his own engines, and he always uses a tool he wrote himself (along with libraries) that recreates Flash's art pipeline since he and the people he works with loved the way Flash did it and it works better for them than modern proprietary engines' systems. Now, Glaiel tailors his engines to his projects' exact needs, so this works for him and his team while it might not work for someone who is used to Unity's art pipeline. As to what Glaiel's interface looks like... well, he would know and I wouldn't! I know he's shown off a bit but I haven't had the opportunity to look.

Sometimes the needs of your project necessitates adding to the engine in some way. Game Maker's room editor used to be notoriously terrible (while these days it's only slightly bad) so most devs would build their own room editor tools using Game Maker. As in, they made an in-game level editor which they then used to make the actual game levels. Most of these games included the level editor as a reward for being the game, since it was already a part of the project.

Unity actually lets you edit the Unity interface directly to add your own tools. Instead of making tools inside the engine, you can create your own libraries and tools and then import them into any future project. RPG Maker has a similar but worse system, where you can add and edit as many libraries as you want but you can't change anything about the interface which dramatically limits how you can implement user-made systems.

So, what all of this means is that even Excel Spreadsheets can be a game engine if you try hard enough - it has functions that can manipulate variables and the spreadsheet's appearance (libraries), and the ability to... make spreadsheets (singular tool + interface). I would not recommend using it as one, but I wouldn't recommend using a computer as a chair either, and someone will inevitably find themselves in a situation where it seems like a good idea.

[hollerite]

My Pinned Post thing!

I don't usually do introductions, but I think I'll make one here just for the fun of it.

1: My name is private, but I go by Hollerite on the internet. You can call me Holly for short, or any other nickname you want I don't mind. 2: I am a straight transgender woman. She/her pronouns, Terfs and other transphobes DNI. Otherwise, I don't really care who interacts with my stuff.

3: I'm a Vtuber! I Stream on Twitch at https://www.twitch.tv/hollerite! I've been really struggling lately, so I'd really appreciate it if you guys gave me a follow. Mostly play Limbus Company and Bloons TD6, but also whatever other random games I feel like, and love taking suggestions. 4: Fanbases I'm in are:

All 3 project moon games!

Five Nights at Freddys

Undertale/Deltarune

One Piece

Lisa the Painful RPG(Not really much anymore, but I might still reblog some fanart)

Portal 2

Warhammer 40K, but basically only the stuff about the Necrons and Adeptus Mechanicus.

Oneshot

Indigo Park

Vita Carnis

Vox(Not Hazbin, I dont like anything else, just vox)

Markiplier Ig? I just watch his videos, not actively in his fanbase, but he's my favorite YouTuber.

But Really I'll probably be posting 90% about Project moon, that's my big obsession right now.

5: Other interests I have:

Robotics, which is for totally normal and not at all horny reasons(I will be hornyposting about robots, it is 100% genuine I love all of them so much)

Prosthetics, for similar reasons

Space travel, for not horny reasons

Data archival and media preservation! This is something I do pretty regularly, so if anyone has some lost/endangered media they want to see preserved, Let me know and I'll add it to my archives! Especially dedicated to preserving old Soviet media, that's fascinating to me. I also have full copies of Wonderlab and Unus Annus if anyone wants them.

Writing! I do at least some of it literally every single day for almost 3 years now, and while ive not gotten anything published yet I have finished drafts of two big stories. ill sometimes tag posts with stuff that reminds me of my characters, that's mostly for the few people on here who have read my stuff, but I'll happily talk about it if anyone curious.

Thats basically my deal, lemmie know if I missed anything I'm very new to tumbling. Will update this as things change

[reilleclan-blog]

I FUCKING LOVR THIS PORSHE

-

-

Hello hi , so I was reminiscencing about 2020. My whole life (most of my life) I only played call of duty. There was story RPGs here and there but I'd always go back to call of duty. And during 2018-2019 I was really starting to hate the State of COD. I played COD since I was little. Playing against bots b/c I couldn't get xbox online. I played the hell out of ghosts, bo4, Cold War, bo2 a bit, in total I'd probably have 4k hours racking up all together definitely more. And it's not like I didn't like story games or RPGs I think a lot of them outgrew replayability for me. The walking dead, life is strange, Bully. Most of these series I watched others play I never had money like that. But when I started working I played the hell out of these games and then I went back to multiplayers. Fortnite, was something I heavily played and Bo4. (These games I played heavily in high school 2016)

Then as time went on I stopped having ppl to play with and a lot of these games franchises I had loved , I started to despise. I never thought a company would hate their communities as much as they do now. I was strictly console player so I never had a chance to "broaden my horizons" with games and/or everyone was playing the same shit. So when I started to hate these games I took a chance on a game called "Cyberpunk 2077" I had saw clips of the game way back when, and I didn't really know shit about it except it was an open world rpg and u can hack shit.

So yeah I just wanted a change in scenery with my games I'd play. So yeah Cyberpunk released and it was broken. I was unfortunately experiencing it on ps4 anddd yeah the game barely functioned. The areas barely loaded in, yeah it was pretty bad. But I still wanted to see what the game had to offer. So as they made updates I was thrown into this new world that had me interested every step of the way. I don't usually say this but I'd genuinely want to play cyberpunk for the first time again.

Fast forward to 2020 I didn't realize other titles had released during 2020 cause all I was doing was playing cyberpunk. I had got a pc before or after it released but yeah. I was enjoying a shit ton of cyberpunk and learning Valorant. But for the most part cyberpunk was ALL I played for 4years. And idk I just can't believe CP2077 had such a hold on me. I think that's how games should be, I think CP2077 has written the best story I've seen in a very long time. And the different playstyles ppl can have was endless. During those 2 years of playing CP2077 there was countless updates and me STILL discovering new dialogues and choices thru out the game. Side quests and all.

I never thought I'd be a Virtual Photographer but CP2077 even sparked that for me and it's just made me so happy. I hope other games can take a page from CDPR's book to make these fresh and interesting. That may be easier said than done and "subjective" but I think cp2077 will be a top tier ip that everyone is going to love like gta and something like Skyrim. I hope I live long enough for the sequel and the world doesn't drop marshal law before I get to experience it 😎

I've felt this way for a long time but a lot of RPGs don't feel necessarily "fun" most stuff just feels like chores in the game. They slap a $70 price tag on these games just for the game to be broken, cliche story writing, and just bland and done before. A lot of RPGs follow a formula and I just hope these triple A companies break out of their comfort zones and actually create something new or engaging. Ppl deserve new stuff. I'm tired of seeing "10/10s" on games just cause it's "expected" to be good (but when I play it it's mid ashell)

This is my opinion please do not harass me over something like a damn video game this is just my thoughts. And I know this is wild but ppl have different opinions, and I'm not a god damn hive mind ass

[secretgamergirl]

I hate this, but it's kinda telethon time.

We are closing in on the end of the month, which means it's going to be the first of a new month, which means that A- I must write a check to my landlord for $1100, and B- That patreon page I keep forgetting to link at the end of posts is going to lock in donations for the month... and then probably take a week or two to forward me the money. For quite some time now, the amount I'm getting out of Patreon has been significantly less than that magic $1100, and that's not even the total amount of money I need to have every month to continue to be alive. There's also food and electricity and a frankly unreasonable ISP bill and all. Specifically, just putting the cards on the table here, the current expected cash ball coming in is... "$762.4" and yes it is super weird that Patreon will list 40 cents as ".4" like that.

So, this month is not The Month. Scraping stuff together, calling in favors, having a nice windfall from putting that little RPG in a bundle, I in fact have enough cash en route to my bank that I can cover rent for September BEFORE Patreon gives me that $762.40, and still have a couple hundred bucks to cover having power and eating enough to stay alive. But when October 1st gets here, yeah, I'm just going to have what Patreon is gearing up to send me here, and if I manage to convince my landlord to give me an extension and wait for that month's payment, I can... MAYBE live through that month? Don't think buying Halloween candy to hand out is in that budget though, and based on current projections, yeah, by November there is going to be A Problem.

I'm trying every angle I can to scrape cash up, but my primary source of income at the moment is still... put entertaining/interesting/informative things up on the internet and hope people enjoy those enough to want to throw some money my way. And this blog here has kinda been the only platform I've had for sharing stuff, so basically what I'm asking is...

WHAT DO YOU PEOPLE WANT FROM ME!?

But no, for real. I have a lot of different irons in the fire right now, and haven't been sharing much on most of them, but if there's a particular sort of thing you'd like to see from me, and particularly if seeing that would leave you predisposed to throw a little money my way, please just flag me down via message here on tumblr or discord if you know how or... some e-mail I'll maybe remember to check, and let me know? I know people still love that Ranma thing I wrote up years ago, I could maybe find more things to do trans readings on? Did people like that FF14 plot summary? Want more like that? Movie reviews maybe? Updates on games I'm working on? I've been spending a ton of time on this really ambitious electronics project. I could talk about that more? Explain how computers work in great detail? Shove everything aside and get back to Twitch streaming? I'm desperate over here.

[arrhythmiacomic]

That’s a wrap on Chapter 3! Be sure to click through to see the chapter 3 end sketch.

Now our heroes get to take a break, and so do I. (Ha ha ha, this is a joke.)

Updates will resume October 16!

Chapter 4 is already underway. We're finally going to learn about Felix Lacarne, about the nature of the 99th platoon, and perhaps...a little bit about everyone else, too?? I hope you'll stick around to see what's next.

I'm very moved by the reception this four-year-long chapter has gotten. A lot of people have come to Arrhythmia in the past year alone, and it warms me to see the response from readers new and old. Thank you. There's much, much more to come.

MEANWHILE, FOUR'S A PARTY IS COMING BACK

If you don't know, I started Four's A Party to keep busy in 2020, because I wanted to do something simple and lighthearted (read: dumb) and because I wanted to dip a toe into illustrated prose. And also because I wanted to do something with an rpg-inspired group of polyamorous adventurers who were more interested in being disasters than they were in completing their quest.

I got over halfway through Four's A Party before I ultimately had to shelve it due to other obligations. It's been sitting unfinished for over two years. BUT NO MORE. I'm finishing it now!

I'm posting the pages that are currently out once a day, every day, over on Twitter--once those are all caught up, I'll start posting the new pages both there and on the Four's A Party tumblr, which I'll reblog here! You can read what's currently out whenever you like, starting here!

I hope you enjoy! If you want to support me and my work so I can continue making things, you can hit up my Paypal! Or my ko-fi!

Or: spread the word, tell a friend! Word of mouth is the best way for people to find me. As the audience grows, so does the probability that I will be able to complete these stories.

Thanks for coming along, and I'll catch you later!

[tricornonthecob]

My legs have recovered

LK 110: Warshington Takes The Cake (and eats it, too)

(pt1)(pt2)(pt3)(pt4)

Don't be jealous because you only have one name, Striker.

This seems like a very pointed question for that century, and James is ready to kick the ass of a grown man three times his weight.

lol I love the sass on this gremlin.

Synchronized Duck And Roll

This frame is a delight.

Either these are the slowest grown men in existence, or James and Henri just have that much movement speed from being street urchins (likely.)

The first rule of Zombieland Colonialland is Cardio.

The expression work is really good in this episode, minus his Interviewing Face.

A Connecticut Standoff.

....I wouldn't hope for that, George, the man was decidedly Not Good at chasing children.

"Dearest mother, James spends more and more time each day in a very misguided way of reporting that will probably expose the Continental Army's doings. I sure hope this letter I will be sending through legal means won't get intercepted by our troops."

Lady Phillips:

I do like that she's keeping Lady Phillips updated on James' hobbies. Lady Phillips has probably figured out they're into each other by now.

Lol the moment James and Lady Phillips meet she'll be like

LP: "Ah! So this is the handsome penniless orphan yank my daughter's been canoodling." James: "OH! uh -" LP: "Sarah has told me all about you." James: "Well -" LP: "All. About. You."

James: Henri I stg you better not make jokes about eating my pigeon babies again.

James: ...okay, fair, that was a good burn.

...money, Sarah. They need money.

The continental army:

Liberty's Kids 110: James Hiller continues to have a Bisexual Awakening.

Henri is the trader caravan you dump your unwanted loot on in every RPG.

Okay but first off how was he able to swipe that british beaver cap, and second off he probably has so much buying power with the camp sundries wagon or whatever it was called. The camp followers must love him.

Fucking hell why did they store so much cannon in bumfuck New York when all the fighting was in Boston.

Oh my god he's bringing the pigeons lol

....good luck with that.

But I bet you he ends up with some killer racing pigeons later on in live.

Nods while still softly smiling. Goddammit stop being cute and gazing at each other like that.

[omamervt]

I have fond memories of Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door for the Nintendo GameCube, and it really is incredible to see it lovingly re-created down to the last detail on the Nintendo Switch. It makes me happy to know people who were too young to experience it ~20 years ago are getting the opportunity now. I truly think it's one of the best RPGs Nintendo has ever made.

That said, there's a lot that I don't like about this as a remake, rather than a simple remaster. Things that I can forgive the GameCube version for since it was, you know, a GameCube game, that just feel antiquated on the Switch.

The QOL updates for travel and partner switching are great, but don't do much to help the fact that most of the Troubles are fetch quests with a tedious amount of backtracking involved.

Platforming always felt like an afterthought added out of obligation rather than an inclusion that was planned around and made with as much love as the rest of the game. And unfortunately, "down to the last detail" means they also brought back all the weird collision issues, jumps that look like they should be simple but really require you to be standing JUST so in order to even be barely doable, the fact that you're literally flat making forward/backward jumps deceptively more difficult than side to side ones, and so on.

The new music is incredibly hit or miss. It's nice that not every area has the exact same standard battle theme, and it's probably good that Twilight Town's theme wasn't quite so... unnerving. But there are some themes that I really wish they didn't mess with, especially the Three Shadows battle theme. I really regret not buying the badge that brings back the GCN edition sounds. It was cheap and didn't cost BP to use.

Also, the idea IS that they're paper, right? why did they make literally every surface reflective? There are so many environments where the amount of specularity makes absolutely no sense. I have to assume it'd be less resource-intensive to NOT do that, AND it'd make the game look better.

[pokemoneverlastingorchard]

Update 4/27/2014

I was forced to restart the game. Again. But I was almost done with the previous one anyway so it's not a huge deal this time. (I just didn't have a child with Souma or get to check one of the bonus cutscenes.)

This turned out to be a very important test run, because I forgot or didn't think about a lot of things when it comes to the babies.

I decided to focus on Alan and Esmaralda this time.

Story:

+Started dating both of them.

+Worked on both post-couple cutscenes to make them flow better.

+Married and had children with both of them.

+Realized that I didn't prevent you from dating or marrying anybody if you choose to stay with one person if you started dating two people before getting married once. I did this. It was hell.

+I stalked them around in two areas. I might just stop there, make a new file and be in a monogamy next. Probably with Umeko. (For some reason I have a feeling that I might have missed up with her in some places.)

Children, because there's so much here it deserves it's own section:

+I forgot to make a second "baby discussion" event if you choose to remain in a monogamy, so I made one. You don't get a choice in the gender- the gender of the second baby is going to be the opposite of your first one when you have a second child with your first spouse. (I don't want to make another two sets of children for every canddiate.)

+Realized that, with the limited amount of "switches" that can be on each character, you cannot have a cutscene with your first spouse and second child unless you have twins. So I made a separate cutscene where you're alone so you can name your child.

I might be able to change this at some point, but for now I have to keep my "switch" slots open since I have to use so damn many already. Doing it this way saves me twelve of them.

+Forgot to actually make sure the discussion about having a baby isn't repeated over and over again every night. I also forgot to turn off the counters for the babies and set them back to zero once they're born so they wouldn't be replaced every day.

+The genius who made this version of RPG Maker decided that you can't have an "event" with a set variable. It's always set as "or above" by default.

This is relevant to the children because I, not thinking about this, had some children set to certain variables depending on who their second parent is. So if you married say, both Alan and Esmaralda, whenever it's Alan's turn to watch his kid outside of the crib, he takes both babies with him. It'd be adorable if this wouldn't mean that your babies could duplicate depending on who you marry.

So instead of variables I had to use up another 48 switch slots- four for each candidate. Basically, I had to name them "Alan skin 1 baby 1," "Alan skin 2 baby 1" "Alan skin 1 baby 2" "Alan skin 2 baby 2" for each and every single candidate.

But at least I saved 12 slots before!

+Because of all of this, I made some changes to the drafted post about babies.

Misc:

+I saw that the "Dating Sim" demo didn't actually work properly. So once this is out you won't be able to have the option to (not) play it until and unless I fix it. (I'm not surprised at all that it doesn't really work. I made it while I was coming down from a birth control shot.)

Instead you get to play a "demo" of the puzzle mini game. (It's the same puzzle every time.) I'm not sure if I'll ever fix the Dating Sim demo. (I'm not sure if I can. I'm not exactly the most coherent person in the world after getting those shots.)

+I made sure that you'll actually Game Over if Hiro dies in the Dungeon Crawler demo. Maybe. It's untested and it was just a quick fix for the mini game I only made just to see if I could.

[talenlee]

March 2024 Wrapup

Well, let’s see there, gamersmen, what was March all about, now it’s over? Did you check the blog daily? I update it every day. That’s a lie, it updates itself every day. I try to limit myself to writing one thing every day now I have a good solid track laid out in front of me, but there’s always something new here every day. I bet you didn’t see all of them. Oh, you did? You liked the days of March? Well name every one.

What did I write about in my Story Pile articles? Welllll,

Skip & Loafer, a romantic anime about not a romantic relationship!

Bee & Puppycat‘s comics, which left me with an eerie sense of helplessness

Buddy Daddies, a 2023 high water mark anime, in that it’s just mid

the Stephen King movie-of-a-novel Christine, about a powerful woman who is also a car that… fucks?

But hey, you don’t just come here to see me talking about media like some kind of movie blog, despite… my doing that… now… for literally years. Weird. Wild. I sometimes think about how this blog is the longest ongoing project I’ve ever had. Anyway, point is, I talk about games! I talked about games this month! Here are some games I talked about!

Gensou Narratograph, a TTRPG made for god damned aliens who care about such a completely different world to me that I cannot help but be impressed and also never want to play it or touch it. Fun trivia, this article had an entirely benign edit because someone changed their name!

Magic: The Gathering Arena and ten things I wish I knew about it before I started playing it.

Marvel United, a cooperative board game made for people with tons of space and money.

The Beginner’s Guide, an interesting game, but also how people treat authors, including generative media authors.

Cockroach poker, an anxiety engine I love and probably will never get to play again!

Fox and I also spent this month, instead of playing a videogame together, talking about anime from 2023 (part 1, part 2, part 3)! And y’know, I’m coming down pretty firmly on the idea that 2023 was just a worse year than 2022. It doesn’t matter, it shouldn’t matter, but when I say that people want to argue with me, and it makes me even more firm on that opinion. That’s not the only writing that happened, though, no no no!

This month I decided, for some reason, to go in pretty hard on some academic concepts. One of them was an article about how capitalism and play might possibly be completely at odds with one aother, which I wrote in a piece talking about playing for money. But I also decided – in deference to it being the month of GDC, three articles addressing academic concepts from my recent readings. They’re about, in order, the idea of the Cynic’s Cop-Out, which is about how we don’t give up trying to understand one another, the idea of the Author-Function, which is about whether or not work is complete if it’s unread, and the idea of Prototype Theory, which is about what is or is not more or less a fruit. I also decided to bore down into a word choice, specifically, how bored I am with the word ‘Epic’ in my creative space.

Alright, what about some stuff that’s a bit less heavy? Well, I wound up writing articles about the Haka, a war dance my family tend to be racist about, and how all fundamentalism is a liar’s game. Hmm. Wait, that’s not less heavy at all. Let’s talk about games!

Setting aside my strangely feral love for a single Magic The Gathering Alchemy card, a format I actually think is a really bad idea to play at this point, and the Paradox Pokemon (but really I’m just going to talk about the dinosaurs), I did a bunch of digging into stuff in tabletop RPGs. For example, I discussed 4th edition D&D’s relationship to pets and the idea of an ‘action economy,’ and the 3rd edition D&D’s relationship to expendable magical items. While in the D&D space, I dug into the Goblin influences on common language in Cobrin’Seil, and of course, the biggest thing, a big bumper set of articles on the Benign Vampire City-State Hecsenfore, part 1, part 2, and part 3!

This month’s shirt design is a cartoon I drew! It’s of a crab! You can get a sticker of it here!

Alright, the month’s end, the month’s end, what’s happened this month?

My mother had a birthday, like she does every year. So did my father, which he scheduled near hers, very convenient. What’s more, his twin brother had one too, same day, which seems a little unoriginal, but whatever. I called my mother on her birthday, and that’s when I found out that her birthday had been yesterday (because of my embarrassing habit of assuming all my birthday notifications on my calendar are one day out because of all my friends in America). Turns out that day? She fell over, and that’s a big deal because my mother is that kind of age range.

And she just took care of herself.

Semester started, and my first wave of marking for my semester, too. This is always full of a weird tension because on the one hand, students are great and I like when I see them engaging with me. But on the other hand, right now, I’m fresh (like a few hours shy), of doing my first wave of marking for the first assignment and that means today has been full of so much weirdly specific angering. Like pulling apart student writing and looking at it and going ‘why the hell would you say that.’

And that’s not a good place to be, because after I get to that emotional level, I then go out of it, discard that entire mindset, and make sure my marks are all good and my feedback is useful and good and I don’t find myself venting at a student for a behaviour of all students. Right? Like no student is in any way responsible for the fact that they said the same thing that all the other students said that was incorrect. That’s a problem we have in aggregate, that’s something we need to direct them around, that’s a thing we need to route. It’s a sign of something I need to bear in mind for the next crop of students.

But ooooo I’m cross!

It’s also been just absolutely absorbing. Like I’m trying to think about what’s happened in this month that I can talk about that is a meaningful share. Like, a friend of mine got into Blitzball and I’m trying to make sure I show up to their games like I’m a nice good soccer parent. It’s cool! I’m trying to get into a roleplay storyline on Final Fantasy XIV! But if I ask ‘what have I done this month?’ It’s… shopping, teaching, marking, phd writing, shopping, teaching, marking, phd writing, loop loop loop.

Early semester! It’s how it goes.

Oh, and also, at the end of the month, Elli had a sore tummy. This was a whole day’s anxiety for me because he got sick on good friday when all of the vets were closed so we couldn’t readily check if we panicked. Thankfully, his aunt Amber was just the best and helped get us grounded about how to handle things.

Check it out on PRESS.exe to see it with images and links!

[jayextee]

Wonder Boy: The Dragon's Trap (2017)

The original Wonder Boy III: The Dragon's Trap is, without a doubt, the SEGA Master System game ever. It looks, sounds, and plays every bit like the distilled very best of SEGA's 8-bit offerings and is arguably (both by myself and many other fans of the system) the best game available for the console.

Having opened this review with such high praise, I probably don't have to say that if any remake of that game were anything less than absolutely stellar and amazing work, I would not be kind to it. I would hold nothing back, show no quarter, take the gloves off, let rip, and tear it a new one. Luckily, it's absolutely amazing and stellar work.

Essentially that's because this is an emulation of the original Master System ROM with a pretty new skin running over the top of it. Okay, maybe a bit more complex than that, but the game logic running here is basically 1:1 with the SMS version even if, and this includes the game with retro visuals and sounds enabled, there are some changes elsewhere.

Good changes, mind you -- what the kiddies like to call 'quality of life' stuff. Really though, how quality do you need your life if your biggest worries are what creature comforts and conveniences a videogame offers you? But I digress here, there's a whole-ass separate button for special weapon usage and the equipment menu is a much more pleasant-to-navigate affair. And, mercifully, they've got rid of that fucking 'charm point' system that I personally felt was an idea that didn't service this game style as well as it would a more-conventional RPG. And, in essence, all it meant was exiting a shop to remove the Goblin Mail, re-entering, seeing the stuff for sale that should've been for sale anyway. Yeah, that tedium's gone.

There are some small layout changes as well, presumably to even-out the challenge a little. But this is all piecemeal stuff compared to the aesthetic overhaul. Oh, wow, the aesthetic overhaul. Let me, frankly, gush.

Imagine a retro game not just upscaled, not just redrawn, but completely reimagined with the utmost passion, respect, and care for the source material. That's The Dragon's Trap right here.

It. Is. Fucking. Beautiful.

Featureless flat areas with naught but trees are now expansive meadows featuring a memorial to a battle long-since passed, continuing onto a valley with a tower hidden inside a forest by the lake. Standard platform gauntlets across a body of water are now a set of tropical islets in a luxurious ocean that culminates in a shipwreck telling a tale of caution and intrigue before the great offscreen unknown. And there's a little stool outside a hut by a lava lake where the owner has carelessly left some impaled marshmallows to toast in the heat. There is so much attention to detail here, and cute little touches, and visual storytelling, it's tough not to fall in love all over again. The game that was my adventurous escape in childhood, is equally so if not more in adulthood.

Music's amazing, too. Not a single piece feels wrong or updated without the full knowledge of what made the original tunes 'pop'. Particular favourites of mine are the desert and jungle themes, both of which have instrumentation that perfectly encapsulates their host environments and makes the adventure connect on an even deeper level.

I am, however, overlooking some of-its-time "flaws" in this game. I don't care. I even put "flaws" in those scare-quotes because, fuck it, they don't make games like this anymore so there's no reason to change it to be more like games they do make. That one Steam reviewer who says the controls are slippery and the coins bounce over the player's head, you're wrong mate. Couldn't be wronger. Maybe a dragon cursed that guy and he's typing with tiny mouse hands that can barely reach the controller buttons?

Anyway, my recent 2.5 hour afternoon playthrough of this game made me fall in love with it for like the hundredth time. Here's to a hundred more.

5/5