#shenmue music

[posthumanwanderings]

[ Shenmue Passport - Information Music ]

[fancypantsrecords]

Ys Net - Shenmue III The Definitive Soundtrack | Brave Wave | 2022 | Orange Translucent + Red Translucent + Green Translucent + Blue Translucent + Pink Translucent + Brown + Yellow + Blue + White + Green + Red

[dudja]

What’s your favorite Sega Dreamcast video game?

[3jane-rosen]

I love this song and this is a beautiful rendition!

Main Theme (Shenmue) - Project X Zone 2 Original Sound Version

[genericpuff]

Lore Olympus just pulled off the biggest whiff in webtoon history.

I promised I would choose one of two headlines and of course, this is the one we wound up with. But should we really be surprised? Rachel herself seemed to be telling on herself down to the minutes leading up to the finale, fully confirming to us that yes, she's been writing this comic at the last minute, by the seat of her pants, for ages now.

(that second one was literally posted TWENTY FUCKING MINUTES BEFORE THE COMIC UPDATED.)

Welp, let's get into it. Possibly the last essay I'll ever write about this dumpster fire of a comic (but probably not, let's be real LOL)

CONTENT WARNING: DISCUSSION OF SEXUAL ASSAULT AND FASTPASS SPOILERS FOR THE SERIES FINALE AHEAD!

Holy crap, where to even start with this. I knew it was going to be bad. I knew it was going to be rushed. I knew it wasn't ever going to live up to what I had hoped it would be years ago when I was still a diehard fan.

But I didn't think it was going to fall quite this hard. Despite bracing myself for the worst, Rachel has once again let my expectations down through a final display of explosive mediocrity and disappointment.

Yes, the episode is called "You're Welcome", and yes, that instant "ick" you're feeling is the exact same as what we're all feeling. This title plays into the dialogue later, but what a shitty, lowkey mean-spirited title for the series finale.

Now, before we get into the actual episode, the WT ads for this are just... so desperate and misleading.

They are trying SO HARD to hype up something that isn't there, and at the last minute to boot, because Rachel definitely hadn't written any of this ahead of time.

First off, the bit about the gods being in "eternal chaos" of course isn't a stake worth worrying over because Gaia literally does away with Ouranos in the first 5 panels.

Did you really think I was joking about that 5 panels thing?

That's it. That's the death of Ouranos. As mysteriously and quickly as he arrived, he was gone, after Gaia ripped out of him what appeared to be some purple sunny side up - but it's actually, in fact, Apollo.

And that's when we start to get some of the worst dialogue I've ever seen throughout LO. Remember when I said LO's dialogue was like Shenmue 3? Welp, the finale decided to continue that tradition and further fuel the suspicion that this entire thing was written by ChatGPT.

Oh, by the way, that "thank you, ma'am" was Artemis' first and last line of the episode. So once again, just like in Episode 248, we're completely robbed of her reaction to Apollo being a rapist piece of shit and the character development she could have had as a supporting character. The women in this "feminist retelling" really couldn't be more half-baked.

Gaia stumbles upon Persephone, and I'm not even gonna fucking bother showing the panels where Gaia says it's time to "make things right" because they literally don't matter. Why don't they matter? Because Rachel just had to get in one more pointless time skip.

We're shown a sequence of pointless images that I'm not gonna show as I don't want to waste my image limit on them, depicting Hades having a sad day because his small wife isn't with him and oh nooo what could have happened?? Did Persephone finally divorce him ??

Nah, we couldn't possibly have an actually happy ending in this comic. Instead we get a completely pointless phone conversation between Hades and Hecate-

Not only is the grammar particularly bad in this episode, but the actual script-writing is atrocious. We literally did not need this phone conversation to happen because-

-we're cutting BACK TO THE PRESENT THAT WE JUST CUT AWAY FROM FOR A 3 MONTH TIME SKIP. FOR NO REASON BESIDES SHOWING HADES BE SAD OVER SOMETHING THAT ACTUALLY ISN'T THAT BIG A DEAL, AS YOU'RE ABOUT TO SEE.

I- I LITERALLY HAVE NO WORDS. I HAVE NO WORDS TO DESCRIBE WHAT THE FUCK THIS IS. ALL I CAN HEAR IN MY BRAIN IS THE LEGEND OF ZELDA ITEM GET MUSIC-

-BECAUSE THIS WHOLE THING SUDDENLY SOUNDS LIKE SOME CONTRIVED FETCH QUEST. WHAT DO YOU MEAN HADES AND PERSEPHONE HAVE PROVEN 'TRUE LOVE' IS REAL? WHAT DO YOU MEAN THEY HAVEN'T USED 'LOVE' AS A FORCE FOR DESTRUCTION?? ARE WE FORGETTING THAT HADES MUTILATED A GUY IN THE NAME OF 'LOVE'? THAT PERSEPHONE LITERALLY INVADED THE HOME OF HADES' CANONICAL FIRST WIFE BECAUSE SHE FELT MILDLY THREATENED BY HER?

This whole concept of "true love" that Rachel is trying to convey feels so juvenile especially for a series that has sold itself as being mature and thought-provoking and progressive.

HAHAHA SO FUNNYYYYYYY why does Rachel write like this. this is, at best, the writing of a 13 year old on fanfiction.net, which I SHOULD KNOW, because I WAS ONE OF THEM. BUT I'M 28 NOW AND RACHEL HAS ANOTHER 10 YEARS ON ME.

Okay, this is the part where I'm CONVINCED Rachel either just mashed this into the episode in the MINUTES leading up to its release, or she used ChatGPT or something. Because NONE of this dialogue makes any sense. Beyond how stilted and lifeless it is (seriously, this dialogue reads like something from Empress Theresa) Gaia is clearly meant to 'replace' Erebus here which I SHOULDN'T HAVE TO EVEN EXPLAIN IS SO FUCKING DUMB, but ALSO what is even Persephone trying to communicate here? "That is true, but it was a deal I was willing to make and ties me to the Underworld. Please don't change me." What? Gaia hasn't even insinuated that she's going to do anything to Persephone, why is Persephone immediately jumping to this conclusion? What does 'changing' her mean? Is she asking Gaia not to force her to sacrifice something (which she never did)? Or is she asking Gaia not to strip her of her Underworld status? Because again, why is that even something Gaia would do?

Maybe this is harsh but I'm pretty sure even Empress Theresa is more coherent than this, what in the flying fuck is Gaia talking about?

"I can just see the potential for conflict! To relieve you from the burden of the whats, the hows, and wheres." Like... okay, first of all, that second sentence isn't even a complete sentence, it's a dependent clause left hanging, but also what the fuck does this MEAN. Is she EXCITED for the conflict but then contradicting herself by saying she wants to relieve Persephone of that conflict? Or is she saying she can see the conflict it would cause for Persephone to have to perform duties in both realms and trying to insinuate that she's going to relieve her of those complications?

Here's what I think happened - I think that second 'sentence' wasn't supposed to be a sentence, but the start of the sentence to the next panel-

So with that theory in mind, the sentence becomes, "To relieve you from the burden of the whats, the hows, and wheres, you are to spend three months in the Mortal Realm to do spring and the rest of the year in the Underworld. That seems fair to me."

It's still a very poorly written line of dialogue, but at least with that fix in mind it makes sense. But man, you can really fucking tell this episode was submitted at the last minute because that's a serious syntax error that should NOT have happened in this two-time-Eisner-winning comic.

Errors aside, it's clear that Rachel is following through on having Persephone spend only three months in the Mortal Realm, rather than the traditional six. There ARE other translations that have that number closer to four, but those four are the time she spends in the UNDERWORLD, meaning she's always spending either equal or MORE time in the Mortal Realm. Of course, Rachel doesn't want her self-insert small wife power fantasy to actually have to be separated from Hades despite this being a retelling of The Abduction of Persephone, so instead of her spending three months in the Underworld, she's now spending them in the Mortal Realm, literally doubling the MINIMUM amount of time (four months) she was originally meant to reside in the Underworld.

But oh no, apparently those three months are STILL NOT SHORT ENOUGH FOR PERSEPHONE-

Of course, Rachel "Retcon" Smythe had to have her cake and eat it too. I always worried something like this was a possibility, but I never thought she would actually prove me right - not only is Persephone only separated from Hades for three months out of the year, but actually he can visit her any time he wants to, so really, they're not separating at all.

I think Rachel needs to look up "reunion" in the dictionary, because if you can visit each other any time, then that means the 'reunions' are no longer special occasions. This completely removes any semblance of depth or meaning from all of the storytelling leading up to this, all of it with the expectation that this was a retelling of the Abduction of Persephone, because that's what Rachel said it was going to be. At this point it's safe to say that Rachel has zero business attempting to "retell" mythological stories, because she doesn't even seem to grasp the concept of why they were written the way they were to begin with. Either that, or she really just doesn't care, and the only reason for making LO a Greek myth comic at all was to propel her career.

This also brings me back to those promotional ads, the other one that posed the question, "Will sacrifice be enough to bring these two back together?"

This is stating the obvious, but I need to make it perfectly clear - Hades and Persephone have never sacrificed a single thing. The only thing they could POSSIBLY quantify as a "sacrifice" is "not being tied at the hip for a few hours", because even Persephone going on the equivalent of a work trip next door is apparently enough to make Hades sad as we saw in the 3 month time skip panels. Why is Hades so sad and lonely if he can visit her any time? Why is he acting like he hasn't seen her in years when he's actually on his way to reunite with her? Why is Hecate calling to ask him if he's "okay" as if he JUST got separated from her, but actually he's about to literally go to the Mortal Realm to reunite with her?

Hades hasn't 'sacrificed' a damn thing, neither has Persephone. They've both always gotten exactly what they wanted, even at the cost of breaking the story's own established rules. Their 'sacrifice' is equivalent to what billionaires think are 'sacrifices' when they can't buy another yacht or go on that third overseas vacation for the month.

And even outside of this episode, when have these two ever sacrificed anything?

I've tried so hard to think of what sacrifices have been made by the characters within LO, and I genuinely can only think of one - and that was when Artemis chose to go to the Mortal Realm with Persephone instead of staying with her family in Olympus. That was a genuine, selfless sacrifice, made by a character who has been shelved in favor of focusing on the self-centered pink and blue airheads.

Being forced to be apart for a couple days to do the equivalent of a day job and whining about it the whole time is not a 'sacrifice'. Neither of these characters have ever sacrificed anything, they just feel like sacrifices because they have the integrity and empathy of soggy cardboard.

sigh Anyways, we're back in the present and Hades and Persephone immediately decide they're gonna have sex because ofc, and then we get this gem of a panel-

MMMMMM

FUNNYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY JOKE

For some reason it's just a common thing for people to just be in Hades' home, and they can't seem to get any privacy as a result of this, but I digress. Turns out they still need to have that coronation for Persephone.

There is... so much wrong in these three panels.

First, to state the immediate issues - why the fuck are they mentioning Apollo at Persephone's coronation? Like first of all, no shit Apollo isn't gonna be there, but also, if this is supposed to be an event for and about Persephone becoming Queen of the Underworld, then why in the WORLD is Apollo even being mentioned? This is supposed to be a "feminist retelling" where the victims are empowered and heal from their trauma, but LO once again can't try to show any sort of positive growth for the victims without bringing up the assaulters and giving them screen time. It just goes to show that Rachel's idea of "healing" is purely rooted in the revenge, and not the growth. It's a very high schooler approach to this subject, hellbent on showcasing how all the meanies from the past are losers now and life just sucked for them forever, but inadvertently proving its own point that the victims haven't and can't move on because the narrative is spending so much time on caring what's going on with the abusers. It's the "I don't care! Look at how little I care! I'll prove it to you by putting in the effort of showing you how little I care!" approach, it doesn't really feel like moving on.

It's not about how Persephone and his other victims could have grown and healed, no, Rachel always needs to highlight just how much worse the bullies and haters and abusers are doing to make the victims seem like they've healed by comparison. Don't get me wrong, I can understand wanting to showcase the downfall of a character like Apollo, but this just... isn't the right context for that? Because it's once again taking attention away from the victim to focus on the abuser. It's once again spending screentime on the voices of the oppressors rather than the oppressed.

And speaking of, what the fuck is this punishment even? I knew Rachel wasn't gonna be able to resolve this plotline properly, she never had the capability to, but ... community service? Are you fucking for real? What is this even a punishment for even? Was this EXCLUSIVELY the SA, or does this ALSO include his attempts to overthrow Zeus by poisoning him, nearly killing Daphne, Eris, Eros and Psyche, trapping Eros and Psyche in an enchanted basement, and framing his father's 'death' on his half-sister? Because if so, how in the world is anyone content with community service? He hasn't even been turned into a mortal, HE'S STILL A GOD, so what's to stop him from going "WE'LL MEET AGAIN, SPIDERMAN" and trying something else? How is this a reasonable resolution in ANY context?

This is why I talked at length about what an issue it was to hide what Apollo really admitted to. Because now we really don't know what exactly he confessed to, and thus we can never really see the point of views of the victims outside of just Persephone - and we still don't even get Persephone's, because she just walks away from him and then he gets eaten by Ouranos and next we see of him is him doing community service! Once again, any emotional development that could be given to Persephone and the other victims is stripped away to make room for the point of views of the oppressive men. In this, the two-time-Eisner-winning "feminist comic" that is LO.

And that brings us to the "where are they now" segment. Yes, as we all feared, there's a "where are they now" segment, and it's as rushed and underwhelming as we ought to have expected it to be.

There is just... so much to unpack here, and yes, all of it is delivered in the dumbest way possible that only raises more questions than answers.

So Rhea and Metis are just back and we're not gonna talk about the implications of them being alive again?

Dionysus is a 3 month year old in the body of a teenager / young adult, and his mom is just alive now because Hades conveniently got his hands on more ambrosia and brought her back to life offscreen? But somehow Triptomelus and Hedone are still child-sized relative to their ages?

How did they 'heal Zeus'? And why is he so content with losing his power as King and Apollo being sentenced to community service after making an attempt on his life? How does he feel about the letter that Hera gave him? Did he even read it?

Where the fuck is Hebe in all of this? Is she okay? Do people still think it was her who put Zeus in a coma? Or did Apollo confess to that, too?

You're telling me Hera and Echo are just in a relationship now despite the fact that Hera is literally racist towards nymphs and there is ZERO reason for them to have a relationship in the comic beyond the fans making gratuitous headcanons out of it? How is Rachel, a bisexual woman, so bad at writing actual lesbian relationships and giving them the same amount of attention as the heterocis ones without shoving them into the background as props for insincere queer rep? And what about Hera herself? How did she overcome her role as the Goddess of Marriage to finally divorce Zeus?

"Ares is still a dog!" Haha! Ares is still a Persephone simp! Happy end!

Why is Eros just standing there smiling at the camera struggling to be seen past Hedone who's just floating right in front of him? You're telling me there wasn't a better place to put her out of that entire panel?

"Hades and Thanatos have been making more time for each other. Sometimes they even have a conversation." I'm sorry, is this supposed to be funny? The man abused Thanatos for years, treated him as just a lowly employee when he was literally his adopted son, and now you're trying to play it off as a joke that they're "making more time for each other"? What the fuck is this?

TGOEM disbanded? Why? What about the women who were genuinely a part of it?

Also, Artemis and Selene are just good friends now because reasons? Because they're both affiliated with the moon, I guess? Why is Selene even in this comic-

"They are still looking for Kassandra". Who? And why? This feels like such a last minute addition to acknowledge a character that the comic spent WEEKS foreshadowing only to have her finally appear as a pointless McGuffin, but it's so last minute that it does nothing. I'm assuming it's Eros and Psyche looking for her, but like... why can't they find her? They're gods, tracking down one mortal shouldn't be that difficult LOL ???

And also, where the fuck is Leto?? You're telling me she was an accessory - maybe manipulating Apollo, maybe not - but we don't see what happened to her? Is she just back to being a social outcast then? jesus christ this comic isn't finished-

Kassandra is where the "where are they now" sequence ends, and we're treated to one final horribly written dialogue scene between Hades and Persephone, where they tell each other how much they love each other in a desperate attempt to convince the audience that this is, in fact, a romance.

There's this thing in romances called chemistry, and if you're good at writing it, you shouldn't have to write dialogue like this. You should be able to see how much the characters love each other through their actions, through their small behaviors around each other. It's not always about what they say out loud, it's about what they don't have to say, because when two people really share that close of a bond based on love and trust and chemistry, words often aren't necessary.

Hades and Persephone do not have that chemistry. It has been apparent for years now, but this final exchange really is the nail in the coffin. There are no microexpressions or subtle emotions, no subtlety in their word choice, and nothing unique setting their voices apart. It's all just "wow thank you for being such a wonderful amazing partner, you are amazing and I love you" word salad that has to do all the heavy lifting for the completely non-existent chemistry that's been at its absolute worst throughout this entire season.

And worst of all, despite this story trying so hard to be focused around Persephone, around her story, her trauma and her healing, her voice... it's still all just about Hades. In the end, she's thanking Hades, and forcing him to say "you're welcome". All of it is trying so hard to convince us that Hades has been a positive addition to her life, that she 'owes' so much to him, but we've obviously seen plenty throughout the comic that begs to differ. And even if he were a better person than he is, it still doesn't change the fact that once again, the men are being held up above the women, with the women being grateful to the men who choose them. LO can try its hardest to convince people that it's feminist, but it is, at best, reinforcing the very same structures of the patriarchal system that it claims to despise and rebel against.

We do get one line from Hades acknowledging Persephone's part in the relationship-

-and it falls so fucking flat because it's still about him and what she does for him, and because nothing about their relationship was built on any sort of organic chemistry. There was a lot more chemistry back in S1, but it was still predicated on Hades lusting after a vulnerable 19 year old girl.

Yep, and that's it. That's the end.

Except it isn't because Rachel wanted to try and be smart by including an 'epilogue' that's really just stretching the episode out pointlessly for another few panels. And of course, we had to get another time skip, just a final dose of salt in the wound, this time to years ahead when we inevitably had to reconnect with Persephone and Hades in the future after Melinoe was born.

To recap, Melinoe doesn't remember... because Hades had Morpheus erase her memories.

This plotline has really started to give me the ick because it actually feels very familiar. Bear with me here, because I'm gonna go on a bit of a tangent about my own original work, but it's because I wrote a plotline exactly like this years ago.

There's this... turning point, in Time Gate: Reaper, when the main character Uzuki is kidnapped by a Reaper (see: undead) who wants to experiment on her in the hopes that he can somehow gain her abilities to bond her soul with others (which later allows her to literally possess people after she becomes a Reaper herself). Mitsuhiro, the male deuteragonist who kickstarts the plot by telling Uzuki she's got a limited amount of time left to live (which he knows thanks to his magical death timers that mark themselves on his skin), feels an immense amount of guilt after finding out she was kidnapped by the Reapers (at this point she's been gone for three months), as they were originally after him; he worries that she was made a target simply due to him associating himself with her, and vows to rescue her.

With the help of some other spunky teenagers and anime trope characters, Mitsuhiro does eventually rescue Uzuki - but for the three months she had been gone, she had been tortured, abused, and experimented on, causing her mind to split and for her to lose any sense of awareness of who Mitsuhiro or her other friends were. She was no longer herself after the hell she had been through.

Mitsuhiro's solution to this is to have Springlock - another Reaper with motivations that are not yet clear to the cast - erase her memory. This is not a light decision that comes without consequences - for the remaining duration of the story, Uzuki is plagued by night terrors and panic attacks, unable to really remember what happened to her aside from whatever brief flashbacks her brain recalls in its haze of memory loss. She is traumatized, both physically and mentally. She has lost three months of her life and memories, and doesn't know how to explain why she's covered in scars that are still healing, why she's missing organs, why she's now blind in one eye, and why the sound of scraping metal and ticking clocks gives her panic attacks. Mitsuhiro has convinced her friends that she's suffering from memory loss due to trauma, but only he knows the truth that he forcefully took her memories away from her, without her consent. This was not the right choice to make. It was not noble of him, it was not a grand gesture of love, he made a decision on her behalf without her consent that has now resulted in her becoming a nervous wreck. Sure, she still would have had PTSD if she remembered what happened, but at least she would know why and could then seek adequate help. Without those memories, she has nowhere to begin to heal. And so we see the consequences of this throughout [AFTERBIRTH] and even the upcoming Thread of Fate. It is a long-term problem that is not going to be solved overnight, especially not with Mitsuhiro withholding information from her.

Reading about Melinoe having dreams about her experiences trapped in Tartarus with Kronos ... it felt familiar enough that I had to talk about why the insinuations of this are so fucked up. I know there are people who are gonna handwave it away as "she's just a kid", "these are gods so what does it matter", etc. but ... it just feels like such an oversight to have Hades effectively erase her memory of her trauma and then hint at them still being present in her mind through her dreams. She did not ask for that. And the fact that she's now dreaming about it all does not bode well. But we're supposed to think Hades made the correct choice, regardless.

But none of this is effectively expanded on or explained, because we get one final scene of Melinoe and Demeter visiting Persephone, who has just given birth to... Makaria?

So it turns out Persephone and Hades are just able to have biological children now. Don't know why, but of course they both look exactly like Hades.

What I was really confused by though is the fact that it's Makaria and not Brimos. Do you remember Brimos? The child that was foreshadowed in Hades' original fantasy dream sequence about his future children about Persephone?

Either Rachel completely forgot about him, or she saw all the criticism over the fact that Brimos isn't a confirmed child of Hades and Persephone (rather, an epithet that can apply to basically any Underworld god including Persephone and Hades) and that her "research" was dependent on a book she read when she was 13 and decided to axe that. But she went to the effort of establishing that all the dreams Hades had were , in fact, canon visions of the future, so good job Rachel, you created yet another plothole on top of the hundreds of others.

And that's where the series ends, on a final nuclear-family-photo of Persephone, Hades, Melinoe, and Makaria. Of course, Dionysus and Thanatos aren't present in this shot because this is Lore Olympus and only biological children count /hj

Why Rachel couldn't move the "the end" portion to THIS part, I don't know, but I'm also expecting way too much of the person who finished this 20 minutes before it was due.

So that's it. Six years and that's what we get. I didn't expect much, but I was still incredibly disappointed, as were many others who walked away from this dazed and confused. Maybe it's all the "haters" deserve at this point. But what of the fans? While many of them are celebrating this ending at best and tolerating it at worst, I can't help but think of the fans of this comic who hung on for so long in the hopes it would "pay off", just for it to go out as gloriously as a wet fart.

As for me, I have such mixed feelings about Lore Olympus ending, but none of them pertain to the comic itself. Most of what I'll miss from this comic isn't the comic itself, but the people who have made reading it every week so fun, the artists and writers who have enriched the content with their own interpretations of what could have been, and the experiences of being part of such an amazing community made up of people who are as long-term-obsessed about this piece of media as I am.

I get people who ask me a lot if it's "worth it" to be so engrossed in the LO slander, who assume that I'm going to "regret" ever being a part of it all... but from where I'm standing right now, I couldn't ask for a better view.

Even if I didn't love every minute of it, everything I have here I owe to this comic. This stupid, wonderful, boring, amazing, pile of shit comic.

[micalpixel]

May Flowers Game - June 2024 Progress Report

Another month has passed, so here’s another update on my gamedev journey. The goal is to create my first video game using the Godot game engine.

(Prior Updates: May, Initial)

Research

The main goal for June was research. Play other character/exploration-focused games with no farming or combat elements and see what they do to keep things fun. Here’s what I played (or watched others play)

A Short Hike: A game about a penguin climbing a mountain. Finding new people, new areas, and moving/gliding were very enjoyable. The game’s 3D environment with pixelated graphics was also a new experience for me. A very nice cozy game.

Rakuen: I love this game. You play as a kid stuck in a hospital, trying to help other sick patients, while also exploring a fantasy world described in a book. Lots of exploration, puzzles, and focus on characters. Catchy music too. Kind of exactly what I was looking for. I think Undertale fans would enjoy this one.

The Stanley Parable: A choose-your-own-adventure game. No NPCs, just movement and a very entertaining and well-crafted narrator.

Potion Permit: You play as a chemist who just moved into a town, and must make a living brewing potions while getting to know the town, its people, and the wilderness. The first life-sim game I’ve actually beaten. The lack of time limits was greatly appreciated.

Shenmue (Watched not Played): An important piece of gaming history. I watched a playthrough of this one, just so I could see this game at its best, and not miss any important events.

Freddi Fish 2 (Watched not Played): A point-and-click adventure for children??!… What’s this doing here?!?! Well, this one wasn’t on my original list, but I realized the point-and-click game genre had many similarities with the walk/talk/trade-items gameplay I originally envisioned. Plus this one had no game-overs and no frustrating trial-and-error like many do. Studying how a different genre handled that kind of gameplay, while making it very accessible and entertaining, was a good learning experience.

Kena: Bridge of Spirits (WIP): I started this one, more for fun than research, but haven’t finished it yet. Beautiful game. As others have noted, it’s like playing a Pixar movie.

OneShot (Not Started Yet): Ran out of time. 😒 Next month. Really looking forward to this one.

All in all, I took 10 pages of notes. Things I noticed, liked, disliked, wanted to think about.

Prototype

On June 20, I began work on an actual prototype (“Prototype 1”). Code from my earlier Godot projects was collected, combined, and improved. The goal is to implement every important mechanic in the game. Everything the player should be able to DO in the game, the prototype should have at least ONE place where the player can do it. In a very condensed environment that's easy to test. Physics and graphics can be fine-tuned later. This prototype is all about functionality. For example:

Walk in 8 directions.

Talk to an NPC.

Choose an answer when the NPC asks a question which triggers different outcomes.

Walk to the edge of a room and appear in an adjacent room.

And overall, things have gone very well! I have a page-long checklist of everything I want to implement in this prototype, and it’s about half-done. :D

Except menus.

And except puzzles.

Puzzle mechanics aren’t added yet. I realized the mechanics I was planning did not have much synergy and were very simple. I also want to review the notes I took during research and study puzzles in general. So, back to the drawing board, for now. Puzzles are the next major step. And I think I have a pretty good idea how I want to change them.

Audio

I made a text-blip sound effect (hear it in the video above) and a placeholder “song” of 6 notes to use for testing music. Since this game’s art style is based on the Game Boy, I did some research on the Game Boy’s sound capabilities.

It has four “instruments” that can play sounds simultaneously, aka “channels”:

Channel 1 and 2: Pulse Channel. Each can emit a quadrangular wave

Channel 3: “Wave” channel with user-definable waveform

Channel 4: A noise wave (think static)

Channel 3 is the most fascinating imo. You can define your own timbre of the sound to be played. If you ever played a Game Boy game that had a unique-sounding song that, chances are it was a custom waveform via this channel. (Also, if you ever played Mother 3, the movie theater part with the retro-sounding music did in fact use the original Game Boy audio capabilities in the Game Boy Advance, and also includes these sounds.)

There is software that can reproduce the capabilities described above in order to create Game Boy-sounding music on a PC. I’d like to experiment with that in the coming weeks. The Game Boy was capable of some really good music. Limiting my scope to its capabilities for the same of my own sanity, plus the flexibility of that wave channel to create custom sounds, seems like it can produce some really nice results, which is very appealing to me.

Graphics

I made a font! It only includes English letters, for now, but it works! I used it in the “Save Pointy” art earlier this week and the prototype video above, and intend to use it for everything going forward.

Closing

And that’s June! Have a nice July, everyone!

[posthumanwanderings]

[ Ryuji Iuchi: Shenmue - Alpha Trading Office (NoPlay) ]

[archoneddzs15]

Sega Dreamcast - Virtua Fighter 3 TB 1st Print

Title: Virtua Fighter 3 TB / バーチャファイター3ｔｂ

Developer/Publisher: Sega AM2 / Genki / 81 Produce / Attractive Action Club

Release date: 27 November 1998

Catalogue No.: HDR-0002

Genre: 3D Fighting Action

A pretty poor conversion of the arcade probably because it was rushed to be one of the 1st games to be released on the Dreamcast. The strange thing is that the DC version wasn't even made by Sega but by Genki. Hmm, why would Sega pass over their No.1 main game for release on their new console to another company? This copy is of the 1st print edition that came with a free copy of Project Berkley. Project Berkley for those who don't know was the code name for Shenmue.

While we're at it, let's talk about the Project Berkley disc as well.

Project Berkley was the code name for Shenmue (or should I say the last code name) when it was in development. This disc originally came free with the first print edition of Virtua Fighter 3 TB in Japan.  On the disc is no game at all but a video. Yep, it's basically a video disc that plays only in a Dreamcast featuring an interview with Yuu Suzuki which talks about his history with Sega and the ideas behind Shenmue. There is also a CG movie of Shenmue which appears to be nothing like the final game. Finally, there is some good music from Shenmue played in the background as you are shown some concept art and sketches from Shenmue along with a few sculptures.

[benpaddon]

Jump Leads launches at 8am pacific tomorrow!

The series is six episodes of science-fiction comedy. It's Doctor Who meets Red Dwarf by way of Sliders, and I am insanely proud of it.

Jump Leads follows two trainees in the Lead Service - a sort-of self-appointed reality police - as they travel to parallel universes on their earliest field training exercises. Chaperoned by the eccentric but charming Captain Lucas, they soon learn that there's more to travelling to parallel worlds than their training textbooks might have covered.

The show features an amazing cast, including Austin Lee Matthews (Final Fantasy VII Remake, Pokémon Revolution, Megaton Girl) and Dino Andrade (Jojo's Bizarre Adventure, Batman: Arkham Asylum, Bidoof's Big Stand) as well as guest appearances from Connor Andrade (We Baby Bears, Shenmue III, Spider-Man), Lemar Harris (who recently appeared as the DM in Rhett & Link's "We Hired an Exorcist to Play D&D!"), and Will Overgard (Sonic & All Stars Racing Transformed).

It also features:

Six (mostly) standalone stories, one of which is entirely about character development take that prestige television!

Two diametrically-opposed characters stuck together through circumstance!

Queer lead characters!

At least two different types of robot!

Two mid-credits scenes that are just for jokes and don't serve to set up spin-offs of some kind!

Theme music by Professor Shyguy!

A subtle, hidden reference to the seminal 1991 cinematic platform action-adventure game Another World!

Captioned versions on YouTube!

I've said this a billion times, but I am so, so proud of how this show came out and I really, really hope you listen to and enjoy it a lot. You can find the show in your podcasting app, or by selecting one of these handy-dandy links:

Apple Podcasts

Google Podcasts

Spotify

Amazon Music

Stitcher

iHeartRadio

Pocket Casts

RadioPublic

TuneIn

YouTube (with captions!)

RSS Feed

Subscribe on Android

[miloscat]

[Review] Air Twister (ATV)

A strange hybrid.

Another Apple Arcade title that caught my eye was this rail shooter. It seems to mash up two Sega classics: Space Harrier (flying person with a gun) and Panzer Dragoon (the lock-on shooting mechanic). Directed by Yu Suzuki through his company Ys Net, otherwise known for Shenmue 3, it certainly has that Sega pedigree! (He also directed the original Space Harrier you see, although he wasn't involved with Panzer Dragoon.)

The game kind of throws you in initially, so you might think it's a simple arcadey experience. Only after failing your first run does it reveal its broader scope (although the game itself doesn't shy away from oddly quoting Suzuki himself saying that the arcade mode is the real game and everything else is just extra). By defeating enemies in the main mode you gradually accumulate stars which unlock nodes in an "Adventure" map. These give you all sorts of things: extra max health, new weapons, charges for a slowdown ability, new cosmetic gear, etc.

This is how Air Twister artificially encourages a player to do extra runs of the main game's 12 stages, although I had fun trying out the different weapons by retackling the short campaign. Also unlockable are new modes of play, only most of them seem especially superfluous, not to mention expensive in stars since you only unlock individual stages at a time for these modes.

As for the game itself, it's pretty decent. Rail shooters like this often have trouble effectively depicting the depth of incoming projectiles to help the player avoid them, and this one certainly has that problem. As someone who grew up on Lylat Wars the enemy placements and formations seem a bit standard as well, and the basic combat lacks that visceral impact. The graphics have quite good fidelity but this seems to have come at the cost of model and texture pop-in, as well as occasional frame stuttering, which you really don't want with an action game like this.

Promotion for the game boasts of its touch and swipe controls, which I didn't test at all. I just used a controller for a more traditional experience, which the upcoming console port would seem to confirm is going to win out as the default scheme. Perhaps as a consequence of designing around direct touch control, there is no crosshair to help out controller players which makes lining up your lock-ons more difficult... or maybe that's part of its Space Harrier legacy, which also lacked this feature. Planet Harriers had a crosshair, pout pout.

An interesting feature of this game is that it represents a collaboration with Dutch music artist Valensia. His heavily Queen-inspired prog rock songs (a mix of old hits and newly composed tracks for this game) grant a very novel "rock opera" feel to the game experience. I don't tend to like lyrical songs in my video games, and they didn't really try to time the action to the music, but even so it's pretty cool to prominently feature this kind of music in a game.

Like many Apple Arcade games, this has the uncomfortable feel of hybridisation between console and mobile game design. It has daily and weekly goals, premium currencies, and even the dreaded timed events. The latter ran for just a month at a time last year (three in total) and their exclusive cosmetics are now inaccessible. I loathe this practice, and they seem to have stopped it, presumably while focusing on the console port. The app icon still hasn't even been changed away from a seasonal event which has been over for eight months. Baffling.

As it is, the odd compromises and decisions in the design of this game would probably destine this for footnote status in the Space Harrier legacy alongside Planet Harriers. Hopefully the console port tightens its focus and gets it more attention, because there's some nice stuff here. I didn't even mention the bizarre lore compendium or the cool environments which again hybridise the surrealist Space Harrier worlds with Panzer Dragoon's more grounded epic fantasy vibes, leading to some imaginative dreamy landscapes.

[scaredybot]

Yes Shinobi was a pain! Stupid enemy killing life drain mechanic! ASUDHSJAJA. The characters, story, and music carry that game

Also I finished a playthrough of the first Sakura Wars game. I'm also playing Shenmue right now. And once that's done I'm starting Resonance Of Fate!

Prior to PXZ2, I had played Fire Emblem: Awakening, and the Ace Attorney Triology and Investigations duology.

In my opinion, this is a better crossover than Smash Ultimate. In Project X Zone 2, the characters actually INTERACT!

I also love how many games are confirmed to take place in the same universe!

YES! THIS!

that’s a lot of games to play through lol (I still need to get on some of these.)

I agree with the pxz2 being a better crossover compared to ssbu (in terms of character interaction.)

like, I didn’t know anything about chrom or lucina before playing pxz2 (I did play ssbu, but wasn’t really interested in them.)

pxz2 made me realize they are indeed unique characters! So I watched a playthrough of fire emblem awakening to get a better understanding of them (maybe I’ll play it one day.)

I sort of love/hate the whole “some games take place in the same universe.” The hate just comes down to me looking at certain games and going “Um ACkTually ThAt DoESn’t MaKe SENse BecAUsE xyz...” I completely understand that it’s more convenient this way and that I shouldn’t be looking into it so deeply lol.

I still think the yakuza and ace attorney thing was genius.

p.s. hope I wasn’t talking your ear off too much lmao

[randomisedgaming]

DragonRiders: Chronicles of Pern the full live stream!

Riven finished his playthrough of the fairly obscure SEGA Dreamcast and PC this week. Based on the Dragonriders of Pern book series by Anne McCaffrey. Released in 2001, it's an interesting game that while has a decent concept the end result is very mixed.

It reminds us a lot of Shenmue as the game is a puzzle adventure title with some RPG elements. The puzzle and story are fairly good, even if the dialogue is a bit clunky. The combat is also sadly terrible and there isn't any Dragon ridding instead that is only shown in cutscenes.

It feels like a game that could have been great if more time had been spent on developing it. The end result is somewhat mixed and feel very unfinished, half the world map isn't used and the game just suddenly wraps up, not long after you meet the main villain for the first time and gives the impression that quite a bit of the planned game was cut out or never finished.

The one thing that really does stand out is the superb music score, which is a class above the rest of the game.

All the video are in a collection on Twitch!: https://www.twitch.tv/collections/00NP7vQ8XBct_Q

First part is here:

Follow Randomised Gaming on Tumblr, for video game, art, reviews, features, videos and more. You can also find us on YouTube, Twitch & Twitter for even more gaming & video content! Buy us a tea on Ko-fi

[melloggd]

Review: Another Code: Two Memories

CiNG • Nintendo • 2005 • Nintendo DS Read it on Backloggd: (x)

After discovering Hotel Dusk, I like many others became enamored by the mystique surrounding its developer, Cing: A tiny team that brought the absolute most out of both the DS and Wii, made 4 Nintendo-published games, and despite that died less than 10 years after being founded.

Out of those 4 games, Hotel Dusk is definitely the most well known, and I absolutely fell in love with it. Beyond the fascinating hardware uses and overall presentation, it was the mood and overall pacing of its story that captivated me. A game relishing in the mundane. Games like Shenmue and No More Heroes captivate me with how they use those chunks of silent, "uninteresting" gameplay to both further enhance the more exciting moments and immerse you more in their everyday worlds. Even Ace Attorney does it in a sense with its investigations.

Long story short: I wanted more Hotel Dusk and decided to try out Cing's first ever Nintendo-published game. And to make another long story short, whilst it definitely shows more rough edges and lack of focus compared to Hotel Dusk, the game's heart is still in the right place.

Its a quirky little game: The textboxes look right out of a flash game, the mouth movements can look flat-out creepy if you pay enough attention to them, and unlike Hotel Dusk most puzzles are moreso there to just...be puzzles, rather than have much of anything to do with the world. Its set up sort of similarly to old-school Resident Evil in that way, I guess. You get a mansion with an assortment of rooms and need to decode how to progress further into the house: Solving a puzzle in the living room gives you a key to a drawer in the office, et cetera.

What really made me draw the Resident Evil connection is the abundance of lore-nuggets sprinkled about: It uses its premise of having two characters with memory issues to let the player ponder over two mysteries at once. Its a neat way to handle the story over its short runtime. Outside of solving that mystery the story isn't all that special on paper, and honestly I mostly played this game as preparation to eventually be able to play Another Code R on Wii.

Yet even in those 5 little hours and all that crust, you can definitely feel the Cing spirit here. The atmosphere of Blood Edward Island in general is fantastic, arguably better than Hotel Dusk, due both to the surprisingly large soundtrack as well as the absolutely brilliant use of the two-screen setups. Its straight-up one of the best Adventure game UI's I've ever used, having a 3D-modelled world on one screen as well as 2D stills of the island's most captivating viewpoints on the other. When paired with the music, it creates a kind of immersion I haven't really felt in any other game, and am sad to realize will probably never be seen in any future games given the 3DS' discontinuation. It really does help sell this abandoned mansion's eerieness to both be able to see it at large and see its more detailed spots at the same time.

What also helps with this is that, for as simple as the story is on the whole and as cutesy as the premise seems (A 14 year old goes investigating with her ghost best friend!!), it touches on some surprisingly dark yet very real subjects, with Ashley reacting accordingly. The writer of all four Cing games, Rika Suzuki, has always emphasized that Another Code is specifically about Ashley's mental state first and foremost, and I feel like these moments of discussing betrayal, suicide, abandonment and grief really tie the game together nicely. But really, what'll drive you through the game is its story and atmosphere, alongside the curiousity of how it'll use the DS hardware next.

With its puzzles feeling so deliberately designed to be "DS gimmicks" compared to the more grounded Hotel Dusk puzzles, it end up feeling somewhat self-aware in a really fun way, like "ooh yeah this puzzle is really clever of us", and you yourself cant do anything but go "yeahh youre right", even when they as puzzles are often not anything special. A lot of the time I'd even argue they're too cryptic for their own good.

The story at large is also like a puzzle in of itself, but with its aforementioned short runtime and constant new little pieces uncovered, alongside just generally pretty sweet little character moments, its very fun to just follow along with. Weird, grounded, silly, ominous, crusty, atmospheric: Another Code is most definitely able to be a lot of things in its runtime. At the end of the day I am still very glad I took the time to play it, if only for the memories it gave me.

[Playtime: 5 hours] [Key Word: Novelty]