#what if they made pixel art a real thing you could hold

[1794]

last night I finally finished the evangelion cross stitch I've been working on for the last month or so...... everyone tell me which angel is your favorite

[crowtrobotx]

I know this is out of the blue, but thank you so much for being a real one 👍✨️

Like I have nothing against people who see Heisenberg as a gay man, they’re entitled to think that. But I draw the hard line at people who feel the need to bash others just because their views don't align, and then when confronted use the piss poor "it's just a joke" or "it's just an observation" excuses. If you're going to be a bitch at least have the balls to own up to it.

Anyway, loved your work since 2021 and wishing you all the good vibes. 🤗

Oh my goodness, thank you!!! This is such a kind message and I appreciate you so much. ❤️ Good vibes right back at you. I’m glad that my rantings have resonated with folks because sometimes I wonder if *spongebob voice* I’M the maniac. Getting dragged into this stuff really makes me feel like it sometimes, haha.

Yes! To be clear I also truly do not care what your HC’s are! I love that there are people for whom gay Heisy is their thing and I hope they are having fun and keep making their art/fic/etc! Even if I really can’t stand the popular fanon ship I’m so glad it exists for folks who enjoy it and I am not going to spend my time posting about what I don’t like/agree with when they’re not hurting me and I can spend my time on stuff I do like!

And like. I know. I KNOW a lot of these people are teenagers. And I struggle sometimes because “do not fight literal children” is a rule I try to live by lmao but I also really don’t like seeing people target and mock folks for harmless fun. (It’s on sight if a 25+ year old starts putting this shit in the tags tho. I know they’re out there.)

Still, it’s extremely weird because they always defend themselves with “it’s just a joke/it’s not that deep” or “oh my god no one is stopping you from liking x why are you so pressed 🙄 i can’t believe you’re letting my nasty opinions bother you just because i put them right where you can see them with the intent of insulting you.” 💀💀💀 Like what could possibly be the point of doing this if not to, at the very least, actively try to dissuade people you don’t like from engaging with the community? Obviously no one can stop me but if I know that there are dickbags out there who are going to vaguepost and make fun of me when I do, I don’t care how confident and thick skinned you are (and I am very,) it’s still going to sting!

People are not bothered because they’re disconnected from reality and think they’re really married to a pixel man, they’re upset because life is hard enough and you come into your hobby space to have a good time and then find lame ass idiots infesting it. I also think the whole “ohhh my god why are you so upset he’s/she’s not real!!” is a blatant attempt to discredit the hurt parties by once again insinuating that they are “crazy” which once again conveniently ignores multiple realities, chiefly that 1) most people are not upset by a simple opinion that their fave wouldn’t fuck them IRL, they are upset at the blatant meanness of the person making the accusations and 2) even if they are genuinely hurt by the thought because it’s a coping mechanism for them, why does that make it okay for you target them? What gives you the right to harass and mock people who are not bothering you? Do these people think they’re doing these folks a ‘favor’ by forcing them to contend with what they perceive to be some kind of delusion? Shut the hell up. Why do people decide it is their god given right to hold strangers on the internet accountable for psychological “problems” that they’ve completely made up.

Anyway SORRY I have a serious problem shutting the fuck up lol. I have never been good at phrasing my thoughts in a coherent way especially when I’m grumpy. I am very glad my little circle is full of awesome, open minded and levelheaded folks and not gatekeepers/weirdos (derogatory) who have decided that diversity of opinion in fandom is bad actually and that women and femmes specifically are enemy number one.

[veebs-hates-video-games]

I'm not entirely sure what to say about Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow. It's good?

I first attempted to play it forever ago, but I only made it like 70% of the way through. I never had a GBA or anything else I could play GBA games on, but my ex had gotten me a Dingoo. Picture basically a GBA Micro, except with four face buttons and an SD card slot, and also it had emulators for basically every 2D platform from the NES through the GBA (and there was a third-party PS1 emulator you could install that worked ok with a decent number of games too).

It worked pretty well for most stuff I played on there, and it seemed to be going perfectly with Aria of Sorrow too, but I eventually managed to get it stuck in a weird state where no matter what I did it would crash ~30 seconds after loading my save. I never could figure out why or how to fix it, and I just kind of gave up after a while and never touched it again even though it had been a lot of fun.

And then finally a couple years ago Konami took a break from releasing shitty low budget spinoffs of formerly good series and making pachinko machines and put out the Castlevania Advance Collection, and then finally more recently the Switch version was on sale when I wasn't in the middle of a bunch of other stuff and felt up to playing through the entire game again.

It's still one of my favorite metroidvanias (and definitely my favorite Castlevania) up there with stuff like Super Metroid, and it holds up pretty well. I did a 100% souls run and had a good time with it. I know I've complained multiple times recently about Squenix trying and kinda failing with their attempts at proper real time combat that actually feels good in stuff like Harvestella and NEO: TWEWY, but here's this GBA game from like 20 years earlier running on a potato that feels tight and crisp and has good feedback on stuff.

I can tell something does that stuff well when I start picking up on things like noticing you can cancel out of the recovery lag from attacks if your attack is a few frames before you land from a jump, letting you attack again almost immediately. I never figure things like that out when they're so mushy that it's not obvious or hardly makes a difference.

And of course the pixel art still looks good and the music is still fun, and the writing is obviously still complete nonsense just like it's always been in Castlevania games. I probably won't ever get around to the other ones in the collection, but this one is still definitely worth it after all these years.

And just to show how far behind I get on making these posts sometimes, I screenshotted that when I saw it on Steam because it was almost the same day that I got it, and I saved it as a reminder to poke @ion-somnia about it because it was a funny coincidence and I hadn't in a while. And then obviously I didn't, and then even more time passed after I finished the game before getting around to this, so I'm totally doing great at doing all sorts of things before I half/completely forget about them, which is really useful when I try to write these posts so I can remember later what I thought about things when someone asks me. Might work better if I remembered to write them before I forget playing them...

Oh also the fake out intro for the Balore boss fight is too good:

[vrankup]

Art of affiliate marketing |vrankup|

Yo, welcome to the affiliate marketing rollercoaster! Buckle up, 'cause we digital marketing agency in dwarka, vrankup are about to dive deep into the rabbit hole of this digital dynamite. I'm gonna break it down for you in a way that's smoother than butter on hot pancakes.

Affiliate marketing, my friend, is like a tag team match between brands and regular folks – we call 'em affiliates. Imagine this: Brands got some killer products or services, but they need to spread the word like wildfire. That's where affiliates step in, armed with their blogs, YouTube channels, Insta grids, or even their own websites. These affiliates are like the hype squad, cheering for the brand from the digital sidelines.

Hold on tight, 'cause here comes the cool part. Affiliates get this magical link – it's like their golden ticket. When someone clicks on that link and buys the brand's stuff, ka-ching! The affiliate gets a slice of the pie – we're talking cold, hard cash. It's like a high-five moment for both sides. The brand gets exposure and sales, while the affiliate walks away with a grin and some extra cash to boot.

Now, let's flip the coin and see why brands are grinning like Cheshire cats over this affiliate magic. Imagine you're a brand with some next-level products. But here's the thing – those products won't sell themselves, right? That's where affiliates come to the rescue. These affiliates have their own fan clubs – blogs with dedicated readers, YouTube channels with subscribers hanging on their every word, and social media profiles with followers who trust them like a best friend's advice.

So, brands team up with these affiliates to get their products out there, to the masses. It's like a collaboration made in digital heaven. Brands are reaching audiences they might never have reached on their own.

Brands aren't just throwing money into a pit and hoping something sticks. Nah, they're smarter than that. With affiliate marketing, they're only shelling out cash when there's a real result – a sale, a lead, something that makes the cash register go cha-ching. It's like a marketing dream come true – you're investing where it counts and getting a bigger bang for your buck than a Fourth of July fireworks display.

Now, let's slide into the affiliate's shoes for a minute. Picture this: You're not a brand owner, but you're passionate about something. Let's say it's vintage video games. You've got a blog where you geek out about old-school consoles and pixelated adventures. Now, brands with killer retro game gear are peeping at you like, "Hey, wanna tell the world about our stuff?" And guess what? They're willing to pay you for it!

Affiliate marketing is like turning your passion into a paycheck. You're not inventing products, but you're like a tour guide showing people the hidden gems in your niche. You're recommending products you genuinely believe in, and for every sale that rolls in through your affiliate link, you're raking in some sweet commissions. It's like being the curator of an awesome museum, but you're making money while doing it.

This image has been removed for violating Quora's policy.

digital marketing agency in dwarka

Here's the kicker – you're not tied down to one brand. Nope, you're like a digital free bird, spreading your wings and partnering up with different brands. So, while you're geeking out about those vintage games, you could also be talking about other cool stuff like retro controllers, gaming chairs, or even gaming-themed socks. It's like having a bunch of mini-income streams, all flowing into your wallet. Who needs a nine-to-five when you've got this affiliate gig going on?

But hey, before you jump into the affiliate pool, let's talk strategy.

1. **Niche Power:** Pick a niche and own it like a boss. Whether it's vegan snacks, fashion hacks, or gardening gear, stick to your niche like glue. People trust experts, and you're gonna be their go-to guru in your corner of the internet.

2. **Content Wizardry:** Content is your magic wand. Don't just slap affiliate links all over the place like confetti. Create content that's engaging, informative, and oh-so-enticing. Think reviews, guides, "Top 10" lists – content that's like catnip for your audience.

3. **Authenticity Matters:** Listen up, honesty is your BFF. Your audience can spot a phony review from a mile away.

4. **Show Your Cards:** No hiding in the shadows, my friend. Transparency is key. Let your audience know when you're rocking an affiliate link. It's like letting them in on the secret handshake – they appreciate it, and it builds trust.

Now, before you put on your affiliate superhero cape, let's talk challenges. Like any epic quest, affiliate marketing's got its dragons to slay.

1. **Saturation Showdown:** In some niches, it's like a jam-packed party, and everybody's trying to outshine each other. To stand out, you've gotta bring the fireworks, the confetti, and maybe even a dancing unicorn.

2. **Ethical Everest:** Steer clear of the dark side, my friend. Dishonest promotions or misleading reviews? That's like wearing a neon sign that says "trust issues." Keep it clean, keep it real.

3. **Rulebook Rumble:** Different places, different rules. Some corners of the digital world need you to shout from the virtual rooftops that your content's got affiliate links. Know the rules; you're playing on their turf.

And now, for the grand finale – affiliate marketing, the dynamic dance where brands and affiliates tango their way to success. Brands score visibility and sales, while affiliates pocket commissions and live their digital dreams. It's like a high-five between the virtual worlds, a secret handshake that only those in the know get to share.

So, whether you're a brand looking to up your game or an affiliate ready to rock the digital stage, affiliate marketing's the melody that'll keep you grooving. Stay awesome, digital trailblazers, and keep those affiliate fires burning bright!

Catch you later

Digital marketing agency in Dwarka | Digital marketing company in Dwarka, vrankup!

[deoxyribovoltaic-acid]

I literally started doing art by pencil and paper. You don’t even need resources to start, you just HAVE to try and start.

Like yes, now I have an iPad, stylus, Procreate, and a liner/marker set for it, but that’s not necessary to “create art”.

My art in the first few months was bad. I will probably go back and redraw a lot of stuff I made back then. But I PRACTICED and I LEARNED and now I’m making art that I am far happier with (ex: Vishmail, Fungly) than anything I started out doing. I put in the effort, I tried to learn, and I got better. I was just as incapable of “making art” back in August of last year as every AI bro thinks they are.

Therefore, whoever on the internet that complains that art was “inaccessible” is just wrong. Literally the culture of art recently has been to destroy the “high class” standards of what makes popular art in museums through modernism and abstraction. Like people have literally been TRYING to make it more socially attainable for people for LITERALLY DECADES NOW, but you’re here to claim that a generative AI that uses data that was scraped off the internet without due payment for the use of said data allows anyone to create at the same level for cheap.

NO.

The only thing stopping you from creating is YOURSELF. Go out there and find a medium to create art; it could be code, MS Paint, pencil and paper, chalk, crayons, those amazing people who use Google docs. You could use fountain pens or charcoal or watercolor paint or a pixel art site.

The only thing that is limiting your ability to create is your belief that you can’t do better, so instead a lot of people settle for the AI to haphazardly build on their visions and claim it to be a way for everyone to have these skills.

Yes, AI can be helpful. I’m not here to say that AI is some dark evil force that’s here to take all our jobs, because in the end it will simply become another tool to optimize our work and to simplify our tasks. I will say, however, that the people who believe in its current state that it can be a replacement for other work are simply wrong. AI is currently in a state where it can be identified as AI art. In the future, if this continues its trend, there will be a high class market for human produced art, not because it in and of itself is more valuable, but because AI would have made itself a less valuable or emotional or powerful media generating system, pushing up the value of human produced work (this is literally just an exercise in supply and demand).

So please don’t try and devalue all the people on the internet and in real life who have genuinely put so much effort into improving their craft by scoffing and saying that ChatGPT makes you a better artist. It’s like saying you’re better at discus throwing because you got a cybernetic arm that allows you to launch it into space. It’s not in the spirit of the competition, and it makes the people who have genuinely spent years improving bit by bit feel like it was for nothing.

AI generated media will eventually have some sort of place in its use for society. However I am done having people put down the skill and effort of human artists to hold their slight “moral high ground” of being able to press a button after writing a line of text.

Go out there and try. Go out there and learn. Go out there and fail, because that’s how you improve for your next time out. That’s how you get good at art, that’s how you get good at anything.

You just gotta start, you just gotta try.

Can't afford art school?

After seeing post like this 👇

And this gem 👇

As well as countless of others from the AI generator community. Just talking about how "inaccessible art" is, I decided why not show how wrong these guys are while also helping anyone who actually wants to learn.

Here is the first one ART TEACHERS! There are plenty online and in places like youtube.

📺Here is my list:

Proko (Free)

Marc Brunet (Free but he does have other classes for a cheap price. Use to work for Blizzard)

Aaron Rutten (free)

BoroCG (free)

Jesse J. Jones (free, talks about animating)

Jesus Conde (free)

Mohammed Agbadi (free, he gives some advice in some videos and talks about art)

Ross Draws (free, he does have other classes for a good price)

SamDoesArts (free, gives good advice and critiques)

Drawfee Show (free, they do give some good advice and great inspiration)

The Art of Aaron Blaise ( useful tips for digital art and animation. Was an animator for Disney)

Bobby Chiu ( useful tips and interviews with artist who are in the industry or making a living as artist)

Second part BOOKS, I have collected some books that have helped me and might help others.

📚Here is my list:

The "how to draw manga" series produced by Graphic-sha. These are for manga artist but they give great advice and information.

"Creating characters with personality" by Tom Bancroft. A great book that can help not just people who draw cartoons but also realistic ones. As it helps you with facial ques and how to make a character interesting.

"Albinus on anatomy" by Robert Beverly Hale and Terence Coyle. Great book to help someone learn basic anatomy.

"Artistic Anatomy" by Dr. Paul Richer and Robert Beverly Hale. A good book if you want to go further in-depth with anatomy.

"Directing the story" by Francis Glebas. A good book if you want to Story board or make comics.

"Animal Anatomy for Artists" by Eliot Goldfinger. A good book for if you want to draw animals or creatures.

"Constructive Anatomy: with almost 500 illustrations" by George B. Bridgman. A great book to help you block out shadows in your figures and see them in a more 3 diamantine way.

"Dynamic Anatomy: Revised and expand" by Burne Hogarth. A book that shows how to block out shapes and easily understand what you are looking out. When it comes to human subjects.

"An Atlas of animal anatomy for artist" by W. Ellenberger and H. Dittrich and H. Baum. This is another good one for people who want to draw animals or creatures.

Etherington Brothers, they make books and have a free blog with art tips.

As for Supplies, I recommend starting out cheap, buying Pencils and art paper at dollar tree or 5 below. For digital art, I recommend not starting with a screen art drawing tablet as they are more expensive.

For the Best art Tablet I recommend either Xp-pen, Bamboo or Huion. Some can range from about 40$ to the thousands.

💻As for art programs here is a list of Free to pay.

Clip Studio paint ( you can choose to pay once or sub and get updates)

Procreate ( pay once for $9.99)

Blender (for 3D modules/sculpting, ect Free)

PaintTool SAI (pay but has a 31 day free trail)

Krita (Free)

mypaint (free)

FireAlpaca (free)

Libresprite (free, for pixel art)

Those are the ones I can recall.

So do with this information as you will but as you can tell there are ways to learn how to become an artist, without breaking the bank. The only thing that might be stopping YOU from using any of these things, is YOU.

I have made time to learn to draw and many artist have too. Either in-between working two jobs or taking care of your family and a job or regular school and chores. YOU just have to take the time or use some time management, it really doesn't take long to practice for like an hour or less. YOU also don't have to do it every day, just once or three times a week is fine.

Hope this was helpful and have a great day.

[socialmediatookmybrain]

Part 10

So, what can we do?

It's not a one-stop-shop kind of deal. It will require intervention before thing get worse, as well as damage control. Sounds harsh, I know, but that's the reality.

Apps need to take further measures to prevent kids from being on social media. Now, I'm not saying everyone under the age of 18 is banned from Snapchat, but these companies target young kids specifically. YouTube made a whole different section for kids (which may or may not be kid friendly). Kids can learn a lot from watching things on T.V. They can learn very valuable skills, especially if they are homeschooled, on breaks from school, or an only child.

Kids can learn new vocabulary through Dora or be inspired to learn some kind of martial arts from some version of TMNT. The problem doesn't lie with technology, but how we use it. Showing kids media that is meant for them is different than handing them an iPad and letting them frolic in the pixel fields of Instagram and TikTok.

Most media on television are curated and labeled appropriately. If you're watching a show with mature themes, there are warnings stating what about it gives it that rating. So why is it not like that for other forms of media.

Well, it's kinda hard. We are living in a time where anyone can post anything. You don't need a medical degree to give medical advice. You don't need a business degree to start a drop shipping business. You can be whoever you want online. It's hard to verify that people are who they say they are. And if Instagram were to start asking for pictures of our ID's, people would be worried (for good reasons).

------------------------------------------------------------------------------

So (for the love of God) what do we do?

Parents can limit screen time for kids. This includes monitoring their activity when they are online. Be conscious of what they are watching and how it might affect them. Just because it is 'kid friendly' doesn't mean it was made for kids. Talk to your kids about what they experience on the internet AND in real life. Show them that not everything has to be digital. Show them DVDs and VHS tapes. Give them a Walkman or show them how to use a payphone. Show them that they can have a safe and healthy presence on social media, even as a kid.

Social media sites need to crack down on creators who are under 18. This one is a bit tricky because it can be hard to determine if an account is run by a 12-year-old or not. If apps stopped incenting videos with kids in them, parents couldn't exploit them. There are way too many kids out their who's next meal depends on if they can cry long enough to take a picture for their latest video's thumbnail.

Social media sites also need to stop promoting content geared towards kids. There's a difference between parents reviewing toys for other parents and adults playing with toys so children watch them and give them money. It's gonna be biased and unfair with this kind of crack down but it needs to be done.

For those of you who are reading this and are a kid, stop and think about what you are consuming. Just because you are under 18 doesn't mean you don't know the difference between right and wrong. But sometimes there are bad things on the internet that might not seem like it. Just because something is 'popular' or 'trendy' doesn't mean you have to like it or follow it. If you see something that you don't like, close the app. If you see something that could harm you or someone else, talk to someone about it. It may be scary but sometimes talking about the bad stuff we experience can be good. Always remember that, while you can delete apps, you can't always get rid of posts and comments. Even if you think they are gone forever, someone else probably remembers it. Be careful about who you watch and talk to on the internet.

HOLD PEOPLE ACCOUNTABLE!!! There are so many creepy and money hungry people in the world and on the internet. Don't be one of them. If you notice gross comments, report them. Don't like how TikTok promotes videos with kids in them? TELL THEM ABOUT IT. Even if these CEOs, founders, or social media teams don't do anything, you can say "at least I tried." Don't be on the wrong side when things start to go bad. Protect kids. Protect yourself.

Even if you make mistakes or become famous on accident, breathe. We make mistakes. Mistakes don't matter as long as we grow and change because of them. Give yourself some grace!

Be aware of things on the internet. Not everyone has the same intentions as you do. Stay safe!!

[nesyaks-art-dump]

The Clown Dream

I had a nightmare involving a clown that I don’t exactly remember much of, but I felt fear in my heart towards the end so that’s why I’m talking about it. So what happened was me and my family, alongside my extended family, were having dinner at a restaurant inside my cousin’s house(?). The clown was already there and he closely resembled Art from Terrifier, which is odd because I never saw those movies and only know him from Pixel Bush’s video on Terrifier in DBD. I called him Archie in the dream and continued to call him that once I woke up until I looked up what his name was, so I’ll just call the clown Archie. Anyway, Archie was scaring the hell out of me (can’t remember why) so I started loading a comically large revolver that could hold 8 bullets with 5 blanks and 1 real bullet (my cousin had shot a blank earlier, don’t remember why). My plan was to have my family play Russian roulette with this gun and have Archie shoot himself with the real bullet. (Oh yeah my family wasn’t scared of Archie or the gun at all btw, they were completely oblivious to the fact that he was a monster, because yes, I recognized him as a serial killer.) I started loading the gun, trying my hardest not to seem suspicious as to why, talking to myself as I was loading the gun, having a hard time counting the bullets and the bullet slots. Archie noticed I was fumbling with the gun but I didn’t notice him looking at me. Once I loaded the gun I got my family to play Russian roulette, everyone was fine with it and I could not tell you why. I guess I got up to leave for some reason (don’t remember why) and when I came back, Archie and the revolver were gone. Panicking, I asked where he went and an older relative of mine told me that he went to the restroom and took the gun with him. This obviously made me freak out even more, resulting in me telling this older relative what my plan was before bolting it out the door, attempting to run away. Before I ran out though, this older relative sounded more disappointed in me when he said, “Now why would you do that?” Instead of scolding me for doing something so obviously insane. As I was running away my mind was racing, telling me that he knows, Archie knows and now he’s coming for me, I had to run, run for the rest of my life, but where would I go? I turn around in a panic and see him standing in the middle of the road, people walking by as if they don’t even notice him. I start sliding towards him, almost as if my body was dolly zooming. (That was the moment I felt fear in my body as I was dreaming.) “Why am I walking towards him?” I thought to myself as Archie was walking away from me with a red balloon in his hand. Archie turned around to face me and I heard a dramatic boom noise, I froze in place as he stared at me from a distance. Slowly, I started backing away, turning around to continue running only to see Archie was standing right behind with arms out, ready to catch me. He said something like, “Right into mother’s warm embrace.” Before putting his arms down and opening the car door right next to him. I was so close to escaping as the train tracks for the train was directly behind him, the train was pulling up now. I started crying as I looked into Archie’s car and saw tools I can’t possibly describe because it was this point that my body was trying to get me to wake up, my vision within the dream becoming fuzzy. Archie was trying to calm me down, shushing me and saying that everything was going to be okay in a clam and soothing voice. “Please…” I pleaded, wracked with fear. “Please don’t kill me.” That was the last thing I said before waking up, the fuzz from my body telling to wake up slowly vanishing.

I think this is a sign...

In my haste to write this out I forgot to mention that Archie said (Or was it me thinking that's what he wanted? I don't really remember.) that he was going to make me his "pet".

[xtrablak674]

Down the Rabbit Hole

First it was the disagreement about filters with my twenty-four year old nephew, who concurrently doesn't have any social media accounts, and says they're adamantly against using filters on photos, they prefer reality to fantasy. I told them I too prefer reality in my art, but on this precious face, the more filters the better. A bitch needs to look good for posterity.

This conversation was the spark, but what would be the kindle is my correspondence with SoundCloud to try to get the log-in for my probably fifteen year old account. They had a bunch of questions about the last playlist I deleted like twelve years ago, and the clincher was they had a long defunct email address from my days when I had a domain name or three. I was explicit in my response that that email address hadn't been in service since maybe 2004.

SoundCloud also wanted me to send a photo of myself holding up the number for the trouble ticket I had opened with them. Now this took me all the way back to the early aughts, because I was sure it was either dating or hook-up sites that would ask you for a photo with some code or string of numbers. Naturally my mind wanted to find one of these old selfies, before the term was even coined.

Cloud accounts were my first stop, I perused my Google Drive, and DropBox but they both only went back as far as the pre-teens. I had considered getting out my first iPad to see if those other alternative cloud accounts would help, but I knew the real tea would be found on the DVDs I burned on my early 2008 MacBook Pro to back up my files, but that laptop didn't really work and I didn't have an external DVD reader that could plug into my iPad Pro.

My alternative and now only Flickr account did a bit better and I found some of these low megapixel photos. But that wasn't enough, I then dived into my sent items on my oldest email address, one of the three I had opened with Yahoo, when Yahoo was the Google of the world. Looking at the old attachments that I sent folks and that folks sent me had me in a downloading frenzy, curious now about why did some of the images still look relatively good while others looked like trash. Alongside pixel dimensions, I saw that MP which I am guessing is megapixels played a large role in if photos looked good twenty years later.

Not content I then decided to try to date when I opened all of my open email addresses, scouring sent items and inboxes to see which were the early entries and thus probably the year the account was created.

All of this to say I still feel strongly that all of this "archived" material is a potential resource to create some kind of new content, I am just not really sure what. I had considered making graphs or list of the different people I fucked with in different years based on my correspondence with them via email, but then this leaves out the whole instant message phase of the late nineties and early aughts, which I will not even lie was a big place for me to hang out. I do have snippets of some of those conversations that I emailed to myself.

But what happens to all this digital debris? I wonder about my current digital footprint which is currently primarily text and DMs, will these be saved? What happens when a platform goes out of business. My personal beef with Apple it has never been easy on mobile to access old content. I loved Time Machine on the desktop OS, because it made it very easy and clear how to access old content.

I think archeologist realize that this "digital" age will not survive the cloud servers and services that we spend so much money backing up and storing it on, but what will happen to these things after we're gone? Will anyone ever see these things or are they just digital debris left behind like an unpaid storage unit?

[Photos by Brown Estate]

[ikroah]

Wherever I have gone, wherever I've been and gone, wherever I have gone, the blues are all the same —“Blues Run the Game,” Jackson C. Frank (1965)

It Keeps Right On a-Hurtin’ #23 - Ring-a-Ding-Ding II

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Notes / Original Pencils / Transcript:

Notes:

Let’s talk about two things.

The first thing is burnout. It’s hilarious in retrospect that the notes on the previous issue open with an apology that it’s been three months since the preceding issue, which given that this current hiatus lasted six months, lmao. As I’ve mentioned before and elsewhere, shortly after completing the previous issue of IKROAH, the toll of working on it and other projects so industrially for two years finally caught up with me, and by May I basically had a kind of flip turn where suddenly, I could not stand my own art. More than that, I was repulsed by the very act of drawing, of making. Too many self-imposed deadlines, too many long nights churning comics out in as few sessions of work as possible, too many other things that I wasn’t giving myself enough time for. Something had to give, and when it did, I could barely hold a pencil for months without just getting really angry. I wish that I could say that there was something specific that I did to overcome this feeling, but there wasn’t: I can only attribute wanting to draw again to spending a long time not drawing at all, a time in which I tried to basically forget through disuse all of the bad habits that I’d ingrained about making myself make art. Art is an important hobby and creative outlet to me, but sometimes, you really just need to step away from something for a relatively long time so that you can come back to it with a much healthier mindset. And that’s what I’ve done. Thank you all for being so patient with me during IKROAH’s first real hiatus. There have been “hiatuses” in the past but, for example, one thing that I definitely had to strip out of myself was the anxiety and the guilt that I would feel when IKROAH would go on “hiatus” because more than three weeks or so passed between issues. I had myself on an absolutely insane production schedule for no reason except believing that getting every issue out as fast as possible was paramount. When I first began this comic with issue #1, I thought I could do one issue every two weeks. This was colossally stupid and going in as naive as I did with this mindset was like ingesting a slow-acting poison. IKROAH issues come out whenever they come out and that’s that from now on, and I feel silly because no reader of the comic has ever acted entitled to anything but that anyway.

The second thing I want to talk about is my art itself. My burnout had a point, especially with IKROAH, which is that there are some things about my art that is very frustrating. Did you know that the reason that IKROAH pages are the size that they are (1080 x 1678 px) is because I draw them two-per-sheet-of-paper at 13cm x 21cm each, and 1080 pixels is twice the width of the (possibly outdated) maximum display width of an inline image on the dashboard, and a height of 1678 pixels matches the aspect ratio of the best way that I could digitize my images at the time, which was by taking a picture of my art the best that I could with my phone in good lighting? This was the standard that I set for myself in summer of 2020 and for some reason I decided that it was etched in stone. I made some small improvements over time, such as finally buying a scanner sometime around IKROAH #12, and then changing IKROAH’s dialogue font and switching to digital paneling in #22, but this is going to be the final issue that abides by that old, absurdly small page size. I have finally reached my breaking point in this issue with how it completely prevents me from drawing fine or distant detail, so this is the final issue that is going to be at this size. Were it not for the fact that pre-burnout I hadn’t already drawn the first two pages of this issue and had formatted the paneling and lettering already for this specific size, I probably would have gone bigger already!

IKROAH has been, for the most part, an artistic playground where I’ve honed my skills and experimented with the comic book form gleefully. Compare the art from the first few issues with the more recent ones to see that development in action. But for all of this development and experimentation, why have I felt like page size is unassailable? I can’t tell you for sure what the “new” page size is going to be, because while I have a larger size in mind, it’s another experiment, not a promise of consistency. I used to think that it was easier and faster to work small because smaller art meant less art, but I’m finally sure that it’s more trouble than it’s worth. Now, I’m extremely excited for what a much larger canvas will mean for the look of the comic, and for the rest of Volume 2, I’m sure that you’ll be able to see me experimenting artistically in some way with every issue.

Original Pencils

Unfortunately, due to the way in which this issue was inked, I don’t have the complete original pencils to share with you! I would draw and ink panels one-by-one instead of penciling the whole page first. This is because I my burnout was actually triggered, essentially, by fucking up the inks on the first page after penciling it and feeling sure that I would have to redraw it, and that making me so mad that I couldn’t bear to reapproach my art at all. I didn’t want to make that mistake again, so I went through the rest of the pages with a lot more caution. Still, I can show you some scans.

One major thing that made working on all but the first two pages was finally investing in real non-copy blue pencils instead of blue colored pencils. Real non-copy blue pencils lack the waxiness of colored pencils, making them draw much lighter, erase much cleaner, and generally behave much more like regular pencils that just happen to be blue. It’s been a godsend for my ability to ink more expressively, and I’m experimenting with inking and coloring styles are going to be my favorite part of the rest of Volume 2, because I think that that is something that I want to overhaul the most.

Also, one funny thing: if there was a significant reason why I made Benny’s suite number 1007, I have forgotten it. Just like how I must have forgotten in the writing and penciling of this issue that Benny’s suite is canonically on the thirteenth floor. Oops! Well, not in this canon it’s not.

I do have one complete pencil sketch to show you: IKROAH’s first ever two-page spread! Bang!

Transcript

EXT. THE TOPS CASINO, NEW VEGAS. The Tops’ signature sign shines brightly outside the entrance, brightly even for Vegas.

INT. THE TOPS CASINO, NEW VEGAS. Casino guests hustle and bustle around the main floor, checking in, heading to and from the cashier on the second floor, and mingling. Leaning against a rail overlooking the slightly sunken gaming area is AGNES SANDS. She stares intently and furiously toward the back of the room, where an older man is laughing with a younger man. The younger man is drinking a martini, wears a black-and-white checked suit jacket, and is oblivious to her presence.

AGNES thinks to herself as she watches him.

Hello, Benny.

Her eye narrows.

You’d think that getting shot in the head would be the worst thing to ever happen to somebody, but at this point in my life, I’m genuinely not sure.

On the casino floor, a RED-HAIRED WOMAN seems to accidentally bump into BENNY from behind, knocking his drink out of his hand. It shatters on the ground, and he turns angrily to face her.

When I was six years old, my father died from a bad fall. He was a caravaneer, so they never shipped his body home.

ROSE OF SHARON CASSIDY stands in front of Benny, clutching a nearly empty glass of whiskey. She raises her hand up to her faced, shocked and embarrassed. BENNY is just as surprised, and even more so when CASS takes his face in one hand and suggests that he come with her to refill her glass.

My mom was our town’s doctor, so after that, she decided to apprentice me as her nurse. I was still just a kid.

She was right to do it. It takes a long time to learn medicine, and it’s a useful skill. She knew it’d do me good.

CASS hurriedly leads BENNY by the hand toward the casino bar. As the pair brush past AGNES, she pickpockets BENNY’s key, and holds it up to glean the room number from its tag: 1007. Satisfied, she drops the key on the ground, and heads for the elevators. Just behind her, CASS points out that BENNY seems to have dropped his keys, and he reacts with relief.

But she was hard, as a teacher. Maybe even more so as a mother. Maybe she had to be.

AGNES’ elevator slowly ascends. First floor to the tenth.

Maybe I wouldn’t have started messing around with locks if I didn’t get it in my head to act so damn rebellious later on. I broke in somewhere I shouldn’t have. Found something I shouldn’t have. I was thirteen.

I had to put my own face back together right there on the concrete floor. Held it in place with duct tape, and two-hundred year old bandages. Pre-war.*

*As depicted in IKROAH #7 and the IKROAH Vol. 1 Special Delivery companion story, “Scar Tissue.”

Ding! The elevator arrives and the door opens.

I still can’t even shave without getting a cold sweat.

Back on the casino floor, CASS and BENNY have it it off. They’re smiling and laughing at the bar, several drinks deep.

Meanwhile, AGNES stalks toward Room 1007.

My mom was happy I was alive, but didn’t care whether I was okay, if that makes sense. She was always like that.

It’s why we fought when she found out about...me, when the changes from the hormones I’d been sneaking got...unignorable.

The lock is easy to pick for practiced hands. It opens with a CLICK. The door swings open and AGNES stands in the doorway, assessing the area.

I wonder what your mother would think of this. What she must have been like. Whether she’s even alive now. I wonder if she loved you, her baby boy, a killer in cold blood.

Eventually, we fought. Physically, I mean. It was a long time coming. I hit her hard, once, and that was it. It was over.

I don’t think I’ll ever forget what that felt like. Maybe I’m not one to talk.

Time passes.

BENNY returns to his suite and puts his keys in the lock.

I ran away to the NCR after that. I was an adult now, and had to start over. And I needed skills that my mom couldn’t have taught me. I thought I’d be a combat medic, out in the field. But no. No, no. Of course not.

BENNY opens his door, looking exhausted and covered in kiss marks. Looks like somebody really wore him out. He shuffles over to his bedroom.

They shipped me to some do-nothing recon station way up north in California, near Gecko. And from the minute I set foot there, my C.O. fucking hated me.

He abused me, berated me, blamed me, because I took his old friend’s position or something. Stupid petty bullshit like that.

I think that he was sabotaging my medical supplies. Messing with my work, trying to get me discharged.

There’s no other way he could have found my estrogen from home.

BENNY undresses in his bedroom, and then flops onto his bed.

Just another thing for him to scream at me about. Or it would have been.

AGNES enters the bedroom.

Never got any military police after me when I attacked him with a scalpel that night and ran.

Maybe he couldn’t cover up his own bullshit well enough, so he just kept his mouth shut. Doesn’t matter. Lucky me.

AGNES rifles through BENNY’s jacket, which he hung on a coatrack near the door.

I ran to New Reno. I’d deserted. The only job I could get was at a charity clinic run by one of the crime families there, and it was dismal. I couldn’t afford to live.

So I started picking locks again. Pockets, too. Got real good at it, too. You’d know.

AGNES’ eyes fixate on something. She’s pulled it out of his coat.

I was stealing to survive. Same dance, different song. Nevermind my hormones, I needed food and shelter. I’d never felt lower.

The Platium Chip.

I was casing one of the casinos there when I saw a man get glassed. I was still a doctor. Still had that oath. So I went to work, and saved the man’s life right there. His name was Yancy Bishop and he made my life a living hell for six long years.*

*IKROAH #12.

Until I killed him.

Something else catches AGNES’ attention in BENNY’s bedroom. Something on his nightstand. A gun.

He came to me helpless in surgery and I ripped him apart from the inside out, thrilled, exhilarated, terrified of myself.

AGNES approaches the nightstand. She picks up the gun.

And after that...I ran away again. Ran until I got to the Mojave. Ran until I fumbled into being a courier. Making deliveries, always running, but not a doctor anymore, not stealing to survive, just some stability in my life for once. For once. And then:

It’s the same gun that BENNY shot her with.

She turns to face BENNY.

You.

AGNES removes the 9mm bullet that she has been wearing around her neck since she left Goodsprings; a bullet made partly from the lead that was fished out of her own skull.

You are not special.

She loads the gun. As quietly as she can.

I’ve been dealing with people like you my entire life. My mother. My C.O. The Bishops...

...your Khans, McLafferty, the Van Graffs...have I killed more people in the last week than you have in your whole...

AGNES approaches BENNY’s bed. She gets one shot.

...was I the only one, Benny? And you couldn’t even do it right. I clawed out. An ugly life, too ugly to kill, even with a gun to my head. Your gun. This gun.

She raises the gun. She aims with both hands. Bodies are easier to hit than bottles.

Rigged from the start—is that what you’d said? You piece of shit. You look like you have everything, have been given everything. So you just had to rub it in, that night. Didn’t you.

AGNES scowls. Her brow furrows with rage.

Always been too big of a target. Too tall, too wide, too mannish. Never been beautiful. Never even got to be handsome, like you. Then you shoot my eye out, butcher me even more—and all for what? A mail-order tchotchke!?

The gun gleams in the sparse light.

I’m going to fucking kill you.

AGNES’ expression shifts.

I’ve killed so many people to get to you.

Her hands start to shake. The gun is heavy in them.

And...and now I’m going to kill you.

Sweat is beading on her face.

Because of what you did to me. Because I can’t sleep at night. Because of you. I don’t sleep, most nights, because of you.

AGNES grimaces as her whole body trembles.

So I’ll kill you, with the fucking gun you killed me with, then I won’t be so...

The gun. The gun. The gun--

I’ll...I’m—

Her eye is wide with terror.

Oh God.

AGNES stands alone in the dark in the bedroom of the man that she has planned to kill. The gun is in her hands. Tears stream down her face, frozen in grief. The gun is in her hands.

BENNY is awake. He has been awake. He is sitting up in his bed. He is staring at her staring at him.

The gun is in her hands.

AGNES fires the gun.

SFX: BANG

[decamarks]

Have you ever thought of making an actual game? Even a little one?? Your 'Atom Amulet' art and gif look soooo good they legit fooled me for a bit when I first looked at them into thinking they were from a real game! Your enjoyment and respect for glitches and games as a medium is really neat, and tbh I'm super curious what you'd make! As someone who actually played a few weird old PS1 and computer games as a kid, sooo many attempts at 'retro low-poly style' games I see always break my immersion when I can see like.. too much anti-aliasing, too many things rendered in real time instead of prerendered (not extremely subtle stuff like raytracing or font choice, which gave away Petscop to a few incredibly observant people lol), etc.. part of the charm of old 3D games is devs clearly trying extremely hard to work with limitations of disc space and RAM! No one's cutting corners! Also the design for Atom Amulet's character is the kind I've been wanting to see SO badly in modern-retro games.. no one ever goes for 'rounded little creature guy who looks a little wonky' designs like you see in Creatures or SHEEP because they think it's too ugly! But it looks COOL! And that's part of why it really seemed like an actual old game to me at first.. I like your blog and art, your passion for games and glitches is really inspiring! Nice job on the animation and 3D art!

AHHHHH THANK YOU SO MUCH ANON ;__; This made me really happy to read... Trust me, I have daydreamed extensively about the kind of games I'd like to make, so I've definitely got ideas for stuff like that. Animation and 3D art in general is my main focus right now though, since I've got a lot I want to create, and still a LOT to learn as well, LOL. I would probably be most interested in making a game with a small team or creative partner, since even small games can be incredibly taxing to create and I'd prefer not to mentally and/or physically implode. (My main problem is mostly finding those people... I'm not good at initiating this kind of thing.)

Anyway, I absolutely agree on being kinda disinterested in a lot of 'retro low-poly' aesthetics, just because they feel too divorced from the actual technology that gave the style a reason to exist in the first place. That's not to say at all I think this style should exist in a chronological vacuum, or that it shouldn't be iterated upon with modern technology, but that it just looks too clean too often, too streamlined! I don't want that! I want WONKINESS!!!

I don't think it's necessarily a fear of this sort of 'ugliness', or at least not always—it's more so that this wonkiness can be sometimes hard to achieve at all. Like. Hold on. I could write stupid poetical paragraphs about this concept, but I think this post sums it up 10,000 times better than I ever could.

The primary function of a comic is to tell a story that is best shown through the format of sequential images. So you might expect that anything made for a primarily visual medium must look 'good' to be effective, right? But it doesn't; MS Paint's ugly palettes and pixelated pens only serve to amplify the expressiveness in this image. It looks silly and simplistic, and that's exactly why it works. Whether this was intended by the artist is irrelevant. It's effective not despite its strange, subtle stiltedness, but because of it.

It reminds me of this post about animation by PilotRedSun, which I think about a lot:

I’ve learned a bit of animation fundamentals, branched out to other styles . . . but I still adhere to the rule that every animation on my channel should have a dysfunctional aspect to it. When an animation contains an error, it distracts the viewer. Thus when an animation is composed of errors, it mesmerizes the viewer.

Video games are interesting to compare to comics and animation in this sense, because most games are made simply to be played. Despite being a visual medium, it isn't necessarily expected to look good; it just has to function as an interactive experience. This emphasis on functionality, created through technological limitations of the time, is exactly what originated low-poly and pixelated styles. Older video game art didn't need to be particularly beautiful, just purposeful. You take a concept, put it on the screen, and continue stripping away pixels and polygons until only its most minimal existence remains, because if you don't, you won't be able to fit it within your meager 64 MB cartridge capacity. It looks wonky, and may not really resemble the initial concept as you saw it anymore... but it works.

That's not to say huge, high-res canvases of pixel art and raytracing on low-poly renders can't be uniquely beautiful as well—I think the ways these styles are innovated with modern technology is just as intriguing. The fundamental aspects of these styles will always be worth exploring, because at their core, they're about conveying things in unconventional ways. Simplicity makes it stilted and strange, and 'ugliness' is what makes it so evocative.

But like I said, I don't think it's a matter of intentionally avoiding these more subtle sorts of strangeness. It's just that harnessing and embracing it to its full extent is very hard. Particularly because modern technology often just... lacks limits. You can do practically anything with it, and that's the problem. If you have a decent GPU and the capacity to follow basic instructions, you can make a simple yet frighteningly hyper-realistic 3D scene in mere minutes, the kind that older video game developers could have only dreamed of. And technologically, it's impressive, but that's it. There are no corners cut, no concepts compressed, and nothing your computer can't handle for you. As soon as the realistic refractions and flashy lights fade, you realize it's all a little empty beyond the subdivision surfaces.

It's easy to get lost in a world without limitations, because empty canvases are just as freeing as they are intimidating. Making beautiful things because you can is obviously fun, and often impressive, but it gets boring. Sometimes I simply want to see things breaking at their seams, stripped down to the point of struggling to exist at all, and working—and being not just beautiful because of it, but fundamentally fascinating.

[radellama]

Games I played in 2022

Well… what a year. Pleased to announce that I actually played some good games this year! And some terrible ones too! And also… I made a game! And graduated! Everything happened all at once, but I at least had the foresight to write down the games I played so I don���t have to stand and look at my bookshelf while trying to remember which games I actually played this year. Some of the games I played are repeat entries from previous years, however I feel that my experience with the games is different enough to warrant writing about them again, and you’ll see why. It would be nice to replay a few games and do comparative analysis/reviews based on what I’ve said in previous years, but I can only really do that with one game I played this year, so I’ll tackle re-reviews another time.

As with the others, I’ll try not to completely spoil stuff, but I do want to go in depth with some things- so you have been warned.

~~~

Spyro 2: Gateway to Glimmer

I don’t know why I forgot to put this in previous year’s entries, as I usually replay it every summer in Dec/Jan. Safe to say, I adore this game. 

I think it was at the start of this year that I played a private stream in discord with a few friends, it was super fun just chatting on the virtual couch and showing friends how charming the game is. I’m certainly not opposed to streaming on twitch for my next playthrough of this either :P

Spyro 2 is the best in the og trilogy- it builds upon the foundations laid in the first game, but is an overall tighter and more focused play than the third game. There’s classic characters with incredible (campy/bad) voice acting that is just iconic at this point, a simple but effective story, and charming places to visit on your journey to gather all the talismans and complete the collectathon. I’ve loved this game since I was a kid, so I know this game almost inside and out, and I could hum pretty much the entire soundtrack from memory. I also really love the low poly ps1 era look if I’m being honest, to me it is just as charming as that 16-32 bit pixel art style and deserves to be appreciated in all of its janky glory!

Game starts with Spyro wanting to take a holiday to get away from the doom and gloom of bad weather, but The Professor intercepts you while you are travelling through a portal and asks you to help. See, Ripto has recently taken over the place, and the people need your help to kick his butt! They promise that they’ll help you get to Dragon Shores to enjoy your holiday if you help them by collecting enough Talismans and orbs to fight Ripto. There’s three hub worlds to travel through, all with a variety of levels, a speedway and secret orbs to collect. Each level you play through has a main mission, which is usually very simple and consists of going from point A to point B in order to unlock the exit portal and get the Talisman- but each level also has a side quest or two that provide an opportunity to collect orbs. Sidequest might be the wrong term for it, as they’re mostly minigame-esque - things like lighting up gem lamps, feeding fish to idols, semi-elaborate fetch quests, stopping a crazed penguin chef from cooking baby turtles, helping children terrorists, playing hockey with some monks, that kind of thing. Each level and hub world also has a set amount of gems littering the place, and you can collect them all easily with the help of your dragonfly buddy, Sparx. Sparx is a real g, he takes hits for you and changes colour to indicate your health, and not only helps to collect nearby gems as you walk around, but holding the L1+R1 buttons will make him face the direction of the closest gems. Really helpful for when you’re trying to 100% an area and there’s one pesky gem hidden in a corner that you missed.

The main gameplay for this game is simple 3D platforming, and you have the ability to charge into a run, breathe fire and glide to assist you. Most enemies are really basic, and can be killed with either fire or a charge attack. Small enemies can usually be taken down with either, but bigger enemies can deflect your charge attacks and enemies with metal can absorb your flame attacks. Super simple stuff, you don’t need to think too hard about the enemies in most levels and instead spend most of your time exploring levels and seeing what they have to offer. 

At the end of each hub world, there is a boss to fight- working your way up from Ripto’s henchmen, Crush and Gulp, until you can fight the villain himself. Upon defeating Ripto in a boss battle that (mostly) tests your skill and understanding of the game mechanics in a final showdown, you’re treated to playing through Dragon Shores!

I love when there’s a bit of fun content after the main plot, it’s hard to say no to a nice reward! There’s a handful of nice carnival games to play, like a dunk tank, whack a mole type game, a love boat ride, and my personal favourite, the rollercoaster. If you collect every collectable in the game, there’s also a permanent powerup you can access that allows you to blast through levels. I do remember the powerup being active when I restarted a save on the reignited trilogy, and I had to toggle it off to play normally- but I can’t recall if that’s the case in the og one. Either way, it is pretty fun to have a supercharged power up as a reward for completing everything, as is mucking around in dragon shores.

To close, I really love this game haha. Although I enjoyed the reignited trilogy, I found that there were too many nitpicky changes that were made for my nostalgic tastes- making me always want to return to the og. It’s tiny things, like the monks in colossus doing their ‘waiyayaiyaiyum’ chanting being changed to a cliche ‘ooohhmmmm’ that sucks, adjusting/taking out some of the cutscenes at the start and end of levels to omit the implications of casual murder, changing the voice actor for the Romeo+Juliet mission to a female and male voice actor when it used to be two males… nitpicky stuff that if you hadn’t played the og’s and don’t care (as I so clearly do) you probably wouldn’t notice. It’s not a perfect game by any means, but it is in my heart. Love you Spyro 2 <3

Gateway to Glimmer Forest - https://youtu.be/PEM-pYocKnI  

Colossus - https://youtu.be/-AiVIRplYSs 

Zephyr - https://youtu.be/xVKYvtzhZP8 

~~~

Donkey Kong Country 2

Ahh, a childhood classic. I was feeling nostalgic this year - something you’ll note in a lot of my games as you go down the list - and it was nice playing this again. I also found out that I never finished the game as a kid! There were still like two whole worlds I had never seen before, I have no clue how I missed them but! Yeah! I got a two for one, revisiting an old fave AND new content lmao.

The game still feels tight; I like the way it controls, especially in the later levels where it really pushes your skill level and mastery of its system. Diddy and Dixie are both great to play as, and throughout various stages you get animal companions to either ride or play as. Not all animal companions are created equally, though, as some are really frustrating to play as. Looking at you, Rattly.

I didn’t 100% this, I’ve decided to put it down and call it a wrap for the year with just the bonus world left. It’s really hard, and I like that about this game, but I need to call it at some stage so I can write these! I might continue playing over new years just for my personal satisfaction, but I’m already fine with having gone through the whole thing again and bashing K. Rool (with only one time that I looked up a walkthrough, muscle memory and perseverance through the rest!)

I’m not too sure what else to say if I’m being honest- this was more of a quick playthrough for nostalgia and stress relief while I was in my last weeks of uni. It still holds up to my nostalgic views, the visuals and music are still banging, and I had fun. There are tiny nitpicks I have, like some of the levels near the end not feeling all that coherent with the rest of the game, and the coins don’t seem to save when you close and reopen the game- grinding to get lives and having like 30-something banana coins when I save turning into 0 when I load my file sucked a bit when I wanted to save or hang out with Cranky :/ But I got over it, and I’ll definitely play this again in future lol.

Stickerbrush Symphony - https://youtu.be/mdPlcKg-qFs

Fonky the Main Monkey - https://youtu.be/CUsb2LvSmfM

Snakey Chantey - https://youtu.be/Mr2cFY_3PT0 

~~~

Donkey Kong Country 3

Another childhood classic! This one I know for a fact that I completed as a kid, multiple times in fact. And I completed it again early this year! Fully too, like all the bonus world and all the banana birds and shit. Good fun.

This game is interesting, it is so different to the previous two while still being very much a dkc game. Going from having two light and snappy characters (Dixie and Diddy) in 2 to now having one heavy character (Kiddy) is a bit odd at first, but I have to admit, the level design and character movement felt like the best iteration of the three dkc games. I don’t usually care if sequels have nice refinements, that’s a given in most cases and doesn’t- or shouldn’t- affect my opinion on the game. But for this game? I dunno, it really just feels good when you master it, and I think after playing some form of dkc for most of this year, I enjoyed the levels here the most. Maybe that is childhood nostalgia, maybe it’s a more objective look during this playthrough- who knows. 

What I do know is that this game is super fun, and I felt a much stronger connection to the world as I traversed through it. I think this is in part due to the overworld being more interactive, having a boat to traverse between each section- but I also think the connection with NPCs and the addition of ‘sidequests’ really helped the game feel uniquely like home. I use the term sidequest loosely here, as its more fetch quests and gathering collectibles that you’ll probably collect anyway, but it’s fun going around and meeting all the bears and talking with them. I also really enjoyed the bosses in this game- they truly feel like the final evolution of what the previous two games were establishing. The levels and bosses feel so stand out and memorable to me, and I really enjoyed all the extra little things like the bonus barrels and the circus tent with cranky. Even smaller details, like each level displaying a flag once you’ve completed it, and it being colour coded to tell you which monkey completed the level and if you got all the bonus content- that's so cool. 

This is just gushing, but I can’t help it. I like this game, and it feels so cozy. I like going through all the worlds and feeling such a clear sense of progression, I like chatting with all the bears and helping/pissing them off, I like the unique bosses, I like seeing Wrinkly Kong chilling in her little cave and seeing it fill up with all the banana birds I rescue, and I LOVE revealing the ‘secret’ on the overworld. The story and stakes might not have been as drastic as the previous iterations, but there’s just something so appealing about this game. I can’t really articulate it much more than this, but I did see a really interesting video essay about this game a couple of months after I finished it - highly recommend checking it out as it brings up some interesting points in regards to how unique this game is.

As far as nitpicks go, again I feel some of the later levels near the end game feel a bit out of place (and I do NOT like the rocket level at the end >:( ), I can’t remember if it saved lives and coins between saving and reopening or not- if it didn’t that still sucks! But overall, the changes made here feel fine- it’s a unique game and a nice way to round off the trilogy.

I’ll leave it at that, with the final note of how this game has one really important core memory for me. When I was around 6-8, I remember struggling to get past the bees to enter the bonus barrel in the first rat warehouse level, and my dad introduced me to the concept of patience. It’s so simple, but it blew my tiny mind that I could do things differently if I stopped and waited for a moment, and that it might be the best way to do what I want. To this day, when I’m feeling really impatient and am able to catch myself, I call myself out by mentally replaying that section of the game, and making my way past the bees to get to the bonus barrel. This game means a lot to me lmao

Swanky’s Sideshow - https://youtu.be/Es4yf387pmM

Mill Fever - https://youtu.be/OWmd5dGN5Ns

Water World - https://youtu.be/N3aTwCvbbaQ

~~~

Animal Crossing: Wild World

As soon as I booted up the game for the first time, and heard the title music, a huge wave of nostalgia washed over me- so it’s safe to say this is a really biased look back. I went with my tradition of naming my town Cessabit, and after exiting my taxi and landing in my new home, I got to work. I actually really like the early stage where you’re working for Nook, and I will NOT tolerate any slander towards him. He is an earnest and kind tanuki who helps you get your bearings with no time limits, you all wish you had someone like that in your life!

Guess what? MORE NOSTALGIA!

I played a couple of minutes of New Horizons with my sibling here and there at the start of the year when they were staying with me, and I just found myself missing older entries in the series. I stuck with Wild World for a good couple of months, and didn’t time travel or anything. Just playing raw Animal Crossing Wild World. The graphics looked a bit crunchier than I remembered on the ds, but they still have a certain charm that I like. 

After completing the Nook tutorial, I was off on my own, and began doing what I could to earn enough and start living that animal crossing life. I got all my tools, worked towards filling out my encyclopedia and donating everything to the museum, and started breeding lovely flowers to decorate my neighbours houses. I was very glad that Chief was in my town- he’s one of my favourite villagers, so I’d hang out and make sure to chat with him every day. 

One thing I noticed, that was refreshing to see after the sour taste left by NH, was the variety and types of holidays in Wild World. There’s standard ones like the fishing and bug tourney, where you have to try and get the biggest catch of the town by the end of the day- but there are also things like the flower festival, the acorn festival, and other little ones like la-di-day. I also loved when it was time for the flea market, I’d set up my house like a little shop of second hand furniture ready to go and enjoy selling the stuff I didn’t want so I could afford to buy some stuff from my neighbours. Little things like these were so much fun when I was a kid, and I had so much fun reliving them this time around. I appreciated the effort the developers went to in making the holidays not culturally or regionally specific, so as not to alienate anyone who isn’t immediately familiar with the celebrations. You as the player get to understand the holidays while the townsfolk share the festivities, it felt nice. 

The only thing I couldn’t do to complete this experience was play with others in multiplayer. When I was younger, my sister and I would stay up late and play under the covers together from our bedrooms, giving each other gifts and mucking around in each other’s towns. It was extra fun when we got to see our cousin, as he also had a copy and it was really fun to make self imposed challenges for fishing and bug catching and hide and seek, pooling together to give the winner a prize. I also used to be a bit of a shit and dig holes to make mazes across town and force my sister and cousin to play through a certain set of events before I let them free- this was also something I did when I was younger on my own, I’d trap villagers into little spaces I’d dug and push them together so I could see their conversations/piss them off and watch them stomp in a tiny area. It was hours worth of effort to dig that much, for such a small ‘reward,’ - but that’s kinda the spirit of animal crossing. You accumulate hours playing in small chunks to only have mundane rewards, but it’s nice. 

I stopped playing when I missed two days in a row of playing due to uni work and I opened up to see that Chief had left me, and I was so sad. That’s another integral part of the animal crossing experience - the villagers you wanted to stay would always be trying to leave, and the annoying ugly bitch ass fuckers would never leave!

Overall, I really enjoyed this revisit of animal crossing- the term I was going through at the time was the absolute worst one in my entire bachelor's, so playing during class and just before bed was really helping me keep sane. There’s a whole stack of things that make the game mildly miserable to play, like having to donate each item individually to Blathers in the museum and hearing the whole info dump every time, along with not having any indication that you’ve already donated something… just to name one. 

As much as I love this game, I wouldn’t recommend it to newcomers unless I knew for sure they’d be able to understand and appreciate the context of the game. I have so many childhood memories attached to this game, and just recounting a small handful of the ones that I hold dearly would be a whole separate post that wouldn’t mean much to the rest of you, cause they’re MY nostalgic memories, not yours lmao. I loved playing again, but did find myself yearning for the few quality of life updates that were added in future instalments. Overall though, for the second game in the franchise, and the first handheld instalment- great fun!

Plus it has the best soundtrack + the movie is based loosely on this game and is really cute >:)

Title Screen - https://youtu.be/xllH3Zrcbz0 

The Roost - https://youtu.be/DDRKhw6fhyY

6pm - https://youtu.be/X9G6gBCt6T0

~~~

Animal Crossing: New Leaf

I don’t have as strong a nostalgia for NL if I’m being honest, but damn what a nice animal crossing game. I remember the first time I played as a teen and having reservations about the changes, especially in the soundtrack and certain game mechanics, but overall it is such a nice animal crossing game. THIS is the one I would recommend as an entry point to the series if you’ve never played and want to check it out. The mechanics have been refined, and everything is generally very pleasant to play- it has really boiled down the exact animal crossing formula and added a new look and feel to it while still being familiar. 

I love the additions to this game as well, though it took me a while to warm up to them as a teen, they really just make the game extra nice. I like that you can stack fruit in your pockets, and that there’s more furniture and clothing to collect, and cycling between tools by pressing the dpad is amazing! There’s new npc’s to fall in love with, and having control of the town via mayoral duties is really nice. It’s super fun curating the town to look the way you want- I have so much fun putting down tiles and creating nice pathways that lead to nicely placed buildings and bridges. Autism heaven. The only things I really wanna nitpick here are the fact that there’s less pocket space and that new villagers just plop their houses WHEREVER THEY WANT. 

Back in the day, I spent real life WEEKS trying to breed blue roses, and finally got one! One single blue rose! And I was trying to breed it to make more so I could start mass breeding blue ones and add them to my rainbow of roses! ALL FOR THAT BITCH ASS CLOWN PIETRO TO PLONK HIS HOUSE DIRECTLY ON THE ONLY FUCKING BLUE ROSE IN TOWN WHICH DESTROYED IT FOR GOOD AND I HAD TO START BREEDING FROM FUCKING SCRATCH. I HATE THAT FUCKING CLOWN SOOOOO MUCH. Flower breeding is probably the only other real gripe I have- I do not give a flying fuck about flower genetics and needing some arbitrary system that seems as much down to rng as it is to genetics just to get a nice colour. I want to make a gay town with rainbow roses bordering all my footpaths, just let me have the colours. It only gets worse in NH… I spent actual real life MONTHS slowly trying to breed blue roses as I played... Wild world had it right- just put a black and purple rose together and you’re sure to get blue eventually! It used to be about colour combos, I think in WW it was 3 base colours and 5 hybrid colours for roses, that’s epic! And they made some kind of sense, not this bullshit where you need to have bred the roses from particular flowers over a long system to get a colour… fuck you.

Anyway, back to NL. As a 3DS game the graphics held up really well in my opinion. Everything is so cute and having a better depth perception in general is nice (and that’s without the 3D enabled, it’s cool but hurts my eyes so I never really used it). The big changes for this game are that you are the mayor and have more direct control over the town, that most of the shops are now in a main street above the town, and the addition of the island. I already touched on the mayor thing, and if you know NH you know the general deal for it here. The main street is an interesting choice, but it was one of the changes I didn’t immediately turn my nose at when I first played as a teen. That’s because it’s really cool to see your progress as you open more shops and the place gets more lively. In WW, you only really upgraded Nook’s as you progressed, but now you can upgrade Nook’s AND unlock a whole strip of places to shop at and hang out in. The museum is really nice too, they really stepped up in making it an even nicer place to visit. And, with the expanded encyclopedia, there’s plenty to collect and donate. Unlocking the shops all felt pretty natural and related- there were standard things like ‘when you’ve shopped a certain amount at Nooks, it’ll expand,’ and ‘if you get your fortune enough times, Katrina will open up shop,’ - but there are other things like getting to know Dr Shrunk and having to get villagers to sign a petition to open up a nightclub, and having certain shops opened via fundraising. It really helped create that community feel that’s important in an animal crossing game, a feeling that I think peaked here and was unfortunately lost in NH. Here, while you are in charge of major decisions for the layout and look of town, and the villagers contribute jack shit to the fundraisers as always, it felt like you were making a town FOR the town. In NH, having more control is super nice, especially when you want to get creative with it, but due to it having less interaction with the villagers in this manner, it feels disconnected and more like it’s for your benefit only, not the town/island’s. Plus, the main street being accessible right at the top of your town, only a short walk across the train tracks away is good. A huge improvement to the shopping district in Let’s Go To The City on Wii, which requires you to catch the bus every time you visit :/

The last big addition to this game is the island. I believe there was an earlier iteration of this idea with the gamecube -> gameboy linking thingy, but I didn’t experience the gamecube era so it was funky fresh to me. When you unlock it, there’s new fruits and bugs and flowers and fish- even a new tool/ability, diving! It’s super cool to see things expanded upon this way, and you get an island as a secondary place to curate the way you want. I would always take out all the flowers and shrubs, leaving only the banana trees and placing bananas over every single tile on the island so that it could guarantee a higher spawn rate for bugs and beetles that were mad expensive. 

At night on the island, big bugs and sharks can spawn, and defacing the island in the manner I just described makes it so that those bugs are pretty much the only things to spawn, apart from one or two other bugs that are super common and spawn regardless. Spending an hour or so catching bugs and filling up the max inventory to take home, paired with the bell boom ordinance, means that you can get a solid 200-400 bells per trip. Also, the music on the island at night is just gorgeous, so it was really nice to just unwind before bed and hear that calming music while catching bugs and sharks before returning home and saving for the night. When I babysat as a teen, once the kids were in bed I’d stay up late for the parents and grind on the island like that while chatting with friends online- it was super nice. 

ANOTHER thing the island added- yes, there’s more -is the inclusion of mini games! You can play them by yourself or with friends via local/online play. You can do games that are effectively fishing and bug tourneys- but with special rules, mazes where you have to collect certain fruits, a whack a mole type of thing, balloon shooters, hide and seek - so much to play! When you do well, you get a currency that’s only used on the island and the chance to unlock intermediate and expert versions of the same games, higher stakes for higher rewards! The inclusion of these were super awesome, as when you played with friends, you weren’t limited to making up your own games with your friend until you ran out of things to do- as there are literally games to play on the island! I didn’t play much online back in the day, and I didn’t at all on this replay, but that was a fun thing from its time. 

The last major thing I want to mention, was that this game had a MASSIVE FREE UPDATE, adding the ‘welcome amiibo’ subtitle to the game. I remember when this came out back in the day, it was an unexpected but very pleasant surprise, and expanded on the already large amount of content in the game. You could use amiibo things to do amiibo stuff - I didn’t really play this shit cause I only have a pixel mario amiibo lol. But when you summon someone, they appear in a little camper van in Harv’s camp, alongside non-villager npcs with unique furniture you can order. They added another set of in-game currency, used in the shop and campervans at Harv’s, and you can earn currency by doing ‘dailies’ that you were probably already doing. This was nice, as it was an optional incentive to do things each day/week when you’re feeling a little directionless after having pretty much completed your town aesthetic. Things like picking weeds, sending letters, talking to villagers- the Nook Phone shit from NH originated here! I can’t remember if there was anything else major with this update- apart from the addition of BEING ABLE TO SIT ON ROCKS AND STUMPS!!! That was a BIG FUCKEN DEAL back in the day ahah.

Playing again reminded me of why I loved playing AC to begin with, and made my gripes towards NH even stronger. There was just so much missing from the base of NH when it came out, and pairing that with the annoyingly drip fed updates, content that was removed and having to pay for the DLC… Yeowch. I loved playing NH, but only for a short while. Playing NL, I loved it the whole time. I haven’t checked my NH game in months, but to my understanding, there are STILL things that were present in the base of this 3DS game that are absent in NH- which is very strange considering that game is about living on an island.

Overall, playing this again was so fucking lovely. Even though I don’t have as strong a nostalgia for this game, I still love it nostalgically and even more after this replay - it is The Quintessential Animal Crossing Experience™ in my opinion. Although I stand by the fact that the WW soundtrack is better (:P) there are so many lovely songs here, and the general vibe is so uniquely New Leaf- I struggled picking songs so you get 4, with the recommendation of checking out the rest of the ost if you are so inclined >:)

Tortimer Island (Night) - https://youtu.be/oikomQB2Hac 

11am - https://youtu.be/8MHC3Q7LQ20  

1pm - https://youtu.be/8g54wrI5mNU 

7pm - https://youtu.be/dqSn-tJRbhc 

~~~

Miitopia (DS)

What a strange and funny game. It’s a weird RPG-lite style game centred around your Miis, and I had a good time. I do think that a massive part of why I enjoyed this was due to having brain rot for chrono, so all my characters were chrono ones+my oc harland as my main mii man. And all extra npc types were star trek characters. Lol. 

If you haven’t got funny ideas for friends or blorbos to put in this game, I think a huge part of the charm is lost- however, if you get a kick out of seeing your Miis travelling and fighting monsters and getting to know each other every night when they sleep at the inns- you’re sure to have a great time.

One thing I am surprised by is just how long this game is. I’ve been playing for most of the year on and off, and I’m STILL not at the end. It feels like an endless game lmao, but that is in part due to me replaying each level over and over until each path has been taken. I could say it was for the completionist in me, but it was actually about getting more chances for my Miis to get closer at night the more I travelled. Completing the maps was just a nice excuse >:)

The story is very simple. The big baddie (Matt, from Wii Sports in my case) stole a bunch of people’s faces, and you agree to traverse the land, gain party members, and retrieve everyone’s faces! I think it’s actually a pretty clever way to make the plot revolve around the Miis, and there’s a certain wit and charm to this game that made it super fun. I loved a lot of the cheeky dialogue, and the little ‘random thoughts’ the party members will have while you’re running across the levels. It was very funny when it was something that a particular character would not say, but even funnier when they totally would say that. My best example is Magus saying he ‘needs kitty cuddles’ while on a very long adventure, he both would and would not say that. I love it.

As far as gameplay goes, it's super simple, hence why I’d say it's RPG-lite. Classic RPG turn based battle system, it’s very simple and hard to mess up, but it also has an autoplay feature. I just left the autoplay on during every battle, as I just didn’t feel inspired enough by the simple choices to actually make calculated decisions. It was more fun for me to autoplay and speed it up, paying more attention to the things the Miis were saying and how they were reacting to each other getting hit. This made it a semi-idle experience for me, not the worst thing in the world, but it meant that I’d only be paying partial attention while playing at work or while watching youtube essays in the evenings to unwind. 

Because it’s so simple, I don’t have much more to say. It has a certain wit, one that vaguely reminded me of things I liked about Paper Mario, and it was really funny playing with blorbos in this virtual-dollhouse-rpg game. If this sounds fun, and you have some Mii characters in mind, I’d say check it out! Just keep in mind that it goes on for a really long time, and you’ll have like 10 party members towards the end + a plethora of npc Miis to make/use. I feel the experience is a bit wasted if you haven’t got some Miis in mind, but it’s still a good time regardless. I may or may not see it to the end, but for now I’m fine with calling it done while I’m at the ‘final missions from townsfolk’ stage. Surely I’m just a quest or two away from the real ending, but whatever. I had fun while it lasted.

Getting Changed - https://youtu.be/VNFG451FY_U 

In That Holiday Mood - https://youtu.be/4BaNOx_-azA 

Title: Greenhorne - https://youtu.be/37Oq7Rb_m10 

~~~ 

Aragami 2

Whoo boy. Um, I have a lot to say about this game. I’m also going to go pretty heavy into spoilers for this one cause. I need to talk about this.

As you may or may not remember from a previous goty thingy, I talked about how much I LOVED the first Aragami. This sequel… I knew it was going to be different, but damn it sucks so much… And I completed the whole thing…

So, where to begin… 

Lets start with looks. This one has a more ‘realistic’ look, forgoing the stylisation found in the first game. They made the main Aragami that you play as looks really buff and shit, and they look solid. As in, solid and not wispy or smokey or shadowy, despite being a vengeful shadow spirit. They look like a generic buff assassin dude but with grey skin. I don’t really like it. The hub world that you can muck around in between missions is pretty I guess, but the levels themselves felt kinda empty and amateurish to me. While some of the later levels were quite elaborate with large city structures to leap across and mining caves and the like- a lot of levels just have an infinite plane of water as far as the horizon. To me, that took away so much of the atmosphere and made it feel like an ameture attempt at making a level. Both this and the first Aragami were made in Unity, but this game REALLY felt like it was made in Unity, but in a bad way. The new direction just felt so odd, it barely held onto any of the choices or aesthetics that made the first game feel so charming to me in the first place- scrapping it for more ‘realism’ at the expense of character within the environment and models. It makes it look like every other 3D game ever, and makes me disconnect from it. 

Another place they lost me was with the level design itself. I mentioned a hub world earlier, and I hate the hub world if I’m being honest. It’s just huge and feels empty and when you have to talk with NPCs you need to leap and run across the whole area and it just feels crap. There’s nothing to really do, just visit a shop or dojo and talk with NPCs. There are notable ones, who actually have something more than the other copy-pasted background ones have to say- but even they aren’t memorable at all. You’d think having like a million bland Aragami walking around and wailing at how sad and shit it is to be one would make unique characters stand out. But no, it all just felt to me as though the developers went ‘oh, this worked in [insert almost any other 3D game], let’s do it here’ and fell into all the cliches instead of actually doing what might work better for this game. Every time you do a mission, you need to go to the mission board and enter the level, and when you complete it you’re spat back out into the hub world to chat with the NPCs and unlock the next mission. Being spat back and forth between levels and hub world like this just made me feel even more disconnected from the game and general plot. Not to mention, you revisit the same levels over and over, just with different mission parameters - so everything just feels the same! Because it literally is!

The general plot was confusing and not very good as well. The first game’s plot was VERY simple, but there was a clear understanding of where you needed to go, what you needed to do and why during most of the game. In this one? I had no clue what was going on for too much of the beginning, and then when I thought I had kinda wrapped my head around it, more convoluted shit started happening and it kept losing me. I don’t really know what happened or why in Aragami 2, and I played the whole thing. It was more bland and confusing than RE6, and that sucks…

Though in general the plot was shit, there were a few stand out moments that made me really wish there was a better director handling the narrative elements. As in the previous game, the objective is to be stealthy and traverse through the level, and you can choose whether you aim to be noticed by no one, kill no one, or kill everyone. It gives flexibility, and a fun incentive to try different playstyles for those looking to master the game. Here, due to the levels being separate missions, you had objectives like killing certain people, smuggling supplies, doing some recon and gathering specific items ect ect. The way most players will go through the levels won’t be a kill everyone route- at least not on the first playthrough -due to you being one hit killed if you get attacked. One addition to this game is the ability to defend yourself and parry attacks if you play correctly, A- I disagree on this design choice as it makes it too much of an action game and destroys the stakes in the stealth and B- parrying attacks barely works! I know for a fact I hit the buttons it wanted me to, but it’d behave so poorly and I’d die anyway! Anyway, you’re not going to be killing everyone, it’s a long and tedious task in most levels, and some have something like 80-100 enemies in the level. This made one moment really stand out, it was the highlight of the game for me, and it makes me so frustrated that this wasn’t played upon more!

So, you’re a shadow spirit or something, (and you can’t really rely on your knowledge of Aragami from the previous game’s lore, because it’s different) and you’re part of a whole race of Aragami shadow spirits. There’s some Aragami stuck as slaves and prisoners for the enemy, and there’s some plot I couldn’t follow or understand about a rival? Or something? Point being, you go on missions to various places across the valley, and most of your missions involve getting info on the enemies planned attacks, smuggling or sabotaging supplies and whatever other efforts are needed to help your fellow shadow spirit people. There’s some kind of crystal that can trap an Aragami’s soul and make the wearer of the crystal control them (I think?) and there’s a level where you try to sneak into the mines where the enemy are mining for the crystal. When you get deep into the caves, you come across a bunch of Aragami frozen like statues and it’s pretty unsettling. When you exit that area, you find every enemy in the level has died. If you were like me, you might have killed one or two enemies, but tried to hide them if they were in obvious areas - so to see EVERYONE laying DEAD out in the OPEN was REALLY UNNERVING. You’re one of the only people that’s known to be strong and skilled enough to wipe out an entire map like this, and even then- it’s fucking hard to do so! You have to walk out of the mines and back out into the village area while wading through fallen enemies, until a cutscene plays of the people who killed everyone. I think they were looking for you as well, but you’re just left on that creepy note and report back to the village chief at home. I was so lost on the game up till that point, and it had me ready to put everything aside and genuinely interested to see what was going to happen next- all for it to go right back to the same, boring, disconnected routine of hubworld to mission! LIKE COME ONNNN THAT WAS EERIE AS HELL AND I LIKED IT! MADE THE THREAT FEEL SO REAL AND I WAS WORRIED ABOUT WHAT I HAD TO DO TO GET OUT ALIVE, ALL FOR IT TO JUST PLONK ME BACK INTO THE HUBWORLD AND HAVE A SHIT DUMP OF A CONVERSATION. 

There was another moment, there was this young girl Aragami that you have to rescue and I think she was the girl you chat to in the hubworld a lot. Rescuing her was shit and boring and her mum was losing her mind over the grief and just didn’t mentally recover even when her daughter was returned. The game if shoving all of that at me without really setting up anything more than just telling me that stuff, so I really didn’t give a fuck about them cause they just kept talking at me. But, one moment that could’ve been impactful was when the mother decided to perform a suicide ceremony where she takes off her mask and jumps into an endless pit because she just couldn’t handle her fractured mind anymore. I got back from a mission and saw everyone lined up while she walked towards the pit and we just stood there watching. IF some better narrative steps had been taken to actually make me care, that could’ve been SO MUCH MORE IMPACTFUL. BUT because it is SOOOO DISCONNECTED from the missions I’m playing and she just says the same repetitive shit, I didn’t care! If I’m remembering correctly, the mission you play just before the mum jumps is a request from the girl. She asks you to prove you’re trustworthy by going through a level without being seen and without killing anyone. Which. Girl. I literally plucked you from your slave life and brought you home, and you’ve been chatting with me and watching me go off on dangerous missions and coming back, what the fuck do you mean I need to prove shit to you?? ANyway, you go through the level and have to climb to the top of some scaffolding and look over the blandest fucking plane of water sunset and find ‘inner peace.’ One weird thing I noticed was that some subtitles just appeared even though no one was talking. In the game, up till that point, every subtitle was used when you were listening in on what guards were saying. But this? No one was talking, and the language swapped between first and third person and it was a confusing mess. It was something like 'looking out over the view, I feel my soul at peace. But something unsettling rests in your soul. Time to go back' Like. Ugh. You do that shit ass mission and then get back to mum killing herself and then you go back to more missions. THIS GAME IS ASS!

There were so many things that COULD’VE been COOL, but they fell FLAT!!!!! There’s these weird necromancer priest enemies, who are connected to their Aragami soldiers mentally, and will freak out and alert others if you kill/knock out one of the soldiers connected to them. This could’ve been a cool mini boss of sorts, making it nearly impossible to brute force your way through their web of soldiers until you defeat them, and maybe defeating that priest would make every linked soldier drop dead too, making it a worthwhile challenge for certain areas of the map. But no, they’re just some dude that looks and fights a bit different, and they’re weak af too. I’d just hit them with a dart and then go slaughter everyone nearby quickly. It sucked. Another thing was this strange underground lab that really made me feel like it turned into Resident Evil, there were bones and shit in the floors and so many signs pointing to the fact that something bad had happened there, but it’s just set dressing! One of the only times they do something interesting with the set dressing and it’s barely relevant! AUGH

I have so much more to say but it’s becoming hard to recall everything. What I do remember very clearly was how glitchy and crap the game was. There were so many times where I wasn’t even trying to and I’d glitch through the level and get stuck in a wall or something and enemies wouldn’t behave properly and shit like that. Here's an example I recorded, this shit suckssss!!!!

In the first Aragami, I played through it 4 times before I found a glitch. And I only found that glitch because I was zooming through the level and went too fast, shadow leaping into an area that hadn’t fully loaded cause I covered so much distance, and didn’t have time to render in the door to block me so I fell through it and got stuck in the back room of the game. It was pretty cool tbh, and although I couldn’t find a way back into the level and needed to restart, it was kinda cool.

This game though? I glitched out so much that it was game breaking, and I needed to restart levels when I was ALMOST FINISHED cause something broke and I just couldn’t progress. Which brings me to loading times. Fu Ckin G LoADING TIMES. Most games you can be generous and give it anywhere near 30 seconds to load between levels and still be patient. I like to think I’m generally pretty patient, I play RE and kinda like the door loading screens for fucks sake. This game had loading times of over a minute. EVERY TIME. I don’t usually care about this sort of thing, but this was most of the experience. Every damn time I needed to be spat into a level it was just a black screen that said ‘Aragami 2’ and it took a little over 30 seconds just for the music to load in. I’m sittingß there with effectively a blank screen in silence for half a minute before some music comes in, and even then there’s still anywhere between another 30-60+ seconds to go before I can actually play. And even for when I needed to reload a level I was already in? I’d assume that because all the assets are already loaded it’d take less time cause it’s just a reset, right? WRONG! Full 60-90+ seconds to reload the whole thing again! I know a minute or two isn’t really that long, but man. It is fucking forever in this context. Makes all the unnecessary shit in botw to unlock a shrine, descend into the shrine, and start the shrine feel like speed running…

On a more positive note, Two Feathers are back again with the music and have provided some absolutely gorgeous songs for this game. I really liked the main theme overture, its equal parts nostalgic and hype with its rearrangement for this game. This reflects how the rest of the soundtrack, and game in general, is for the experience. Bigger, and more. While the soundtrack is an undeniable highlight for the game, I did find myself missing the more ambient and atmospheric tracks of the first game, as having a constant track playing got repetitive and annoying. It’s a real shame, cause songs like the Kakurega Village theme are very nice, but hearing the same song for it over and over cause I keep having to be in the hub world makes it annoying! That’s the thing with stealth games, though I’m fairly new to the genre, having big bombastic tracks all the time really deflates the stealthy atmosphere, and ambient tracks (and even silence!) can be utilised to get more out of those select few tracks that do have more going on. I found myself missing the quieter tone of the first game, there was something a little somber about it all, and it really helped me get into the headspace of the game and its story. Here, while the songs are good, they just didn’t help set the atmosphere for sneaking around and killing from the shadows. It really highlights the action elements that were introduced to the game, but it just feels off track for what I personally think the game should be. That’s not to say there aren’t quieter and more ambient tracks at all, just that in general the ratio leans more towards these more elaborate songs- which I feel makes the entire soundtrack feel larger and louder if you get what I mean. 

I’ve already talked for such a long time on this, and I feel like I have so much more to say, but it’s difficult to articulate everything the way I want… I wanted to enjoy this game so badly, but there were so many things that were gamebreaking and straight up not what I wanted from a sequel. It really makes me wonder what was going on during development for this game- despite my feelings for this game being rather sour, I did have moments where I genuinely enjoyed it, they were just few and far between. To my understanding, the first Aragami game was a 7 person team, and they got 3 more people on during development to make it a 10 person team. For Aragami 2, they doubled their team, having around 20 people working on this. Knowing that it was such a small team that made a game I loved so much and have played over and over is really fascinating to me, and it’s a shame they couldn’t capture me with their sequel despite the larger team. I wonder if there was a situation where it was too many cooks, or if someone new took the game in this new direction. I guess I’m just struggling to understand why they made such drastically different choices in ways that feel like they’re trying to separate themselves from their first game- it was a lovely game that was really creative and fun! Why distance yourself? Maybe there’s an element here that has gone right over my head, but I would like to know some behind the scenes info for why certain choices were made and what the development process was like. 

This game is somewhat of a morbid fascination for me, in the sense that it is kinda painful to think about all the lost and wasted potential, and even more painful to think about replaying. There’s not much online that I could find for this game, not even a fan wiki to help summarise the plot. I was really hoping there would be some kind of summary or explanation somewhere, because I really want to know what the hell was going on, and to see if a different method of telling, or a recap of the story might help me to better understand. But no, there’s nothing. At least nothing of substance I could find. 

I think I’ll leave it at that. It has been ages since I played, so my memory is a bit hazy- but I think it speaks volumes that I played both Aragami and Aragami 2 around April/May this year, and can remember more about Aragami than it’s sequel. I don’t think I’ll replay this game any time soon, but I’m not going to shut myself off from it. I did pay for the game after all, I want to get as much as I can out of it. Maybe it could be something fun to stream for a replay, and maybe a second look while knowing what to expect may help me piece together the plot a little easier. Who knows?

Aragami Overture - https://youtu.be/UhSuiYMAXkw 

Lone Mountain - https://youtu.be/QxZYGPea8eQ 

The Great Threat - https://youtu.be/3W2Jf9TFcBE 

~~~

Aragami

So, I have already reviewed this, and I didn’t play in the mindset to construct a real counter critique/look back while playing- it was more of a palette cleanser to play before and after it’s sequel. So this will be brief /cue 10 paragraphs

I love this game, that’s no secret. While I did praise it’s simple story- that’s what I’d like to talk about for this quick look back. I played my fifth playthrough of Aragami this year, and in all those playthroughs, I missed that there were lore scrolls hidden away in the menu that detail more of the story and history. Reading through these, I was able to reframe my understanding of the events and in game history leading up to the events I played through. They were nice little stories- it took me a couple of scrolls for it to really click and for me to understand what was going on, but when I did… Wow. I won’t say much about what they detail, as there’s a lot of names and places and things that happen that I can’t do justice in a recount; but I feel that they’ve really enhanced my understanding and experience of the game and it’s a shame they’re hidden away and so easily missed. It almost makes me want to replay 2 and see if there are any lore notes hidden in menus I didn’t see… almost. I might wait a while before tackling that again.

Also, I just wanna boast a little- I completed every level of Aragami on normal difficulty, every play style. I did a kill everyone route (which is best attempted after your first playthrough so you can take advantage of all your shadow techniques) and a kill no one and never detected playthrough. To challenge myself, I paired the kill no one and not detected and managed to complete all but 2 levels that way. It was really fun going through and feeling how much I had to change my way of thinking and strategizing depending on what style of gameplay I wanted to tackle, this game both introduced me to and made me really enjoy these kinds of stealth/sneaking games. Hell yeah!

~~~

Another Eden

I previously spoke about this game, and that the whole reason I started playing was to see the Chrono Cross event- and I didn’t even talk about it lmao. I’m going to talk about it a little, and then this is effectively a pt2 because I played the pt2 of the main story.

So, Chrono Cross event. I’ve almost 100%ed everything there is to do with the event, just some branching dialogue paths and a Starky fight to do (and Starky is so OP it’s not funny) so I haven’t attempted to brute force my way through any more of it until I can level up more of my faves. Overall, this was a really nice little cross(ha)over event, it had a good amount of story to play through with different routes to take, and the world of Another Eden ties into it so believably that it was a great fit to cross over with. I only really cared about Kid and Serge, so I did their routes (good and neutral) as thoroughly as possible. In classic Kato fashion, I didn’t exactly vibe with the whole story, but it was fun while it lasted and now I get to keep Kid and Serge in my party permanently. I’ve maxed them both out as well, radical dreamer style >:) Now, they stay in my main party group of faves because they are really strong, and due to all my grinding and the way the event works, they both have heaps of light points so they’re awesome when I grind through dungeons. That’s all I really care to say about the event, it’s nothing too deep and I finished my grinding sessions on it closer to the start of the year, so it’s a little hazy and I don’t want to recall things incorrectly.

Now, onto the next main story chunk for AE. Full disclosure, while I enjoyed the most of the main campaign for part one, I found it too closely mirroring jrpg tropes (and in particular feeling overly familiar to ct without coming close to scratching the itch) so I wasn’t fully engaged the entire time. I also thought the ending to that section was convoluted bogus, like just eye-rollingly so. I understand they did that to keep adding campaigns, however ESPECIALLY after playing this section… yeah I still think it's bogus lol. This part 2 of the main story focuses on the ogre wars, and it went into the backstory of my favourite character. Turns out, he’s got a pretty tragic backstory! Trust me to latch onto that before it was even revealed lmao. (The fave in question is Dunarith btw, I like most those beast dudes, and they’re all decent fighters)

Cause this game also has timey-wimey bullshit paired with dimensional fuckery, that’s what leads most of the plot for this section. The ogres that fought themselves to extinction are somehow back, they kidnap the Beast King’s sister, and our main party resolves to put aside their differences and join the beasts to recover the Beast Princess. It was nice to see more of the beast culture (trust me to love the boring world building shit) and it was nice to see even more expansions on the map with more places and sidequests to visit. Snake Bone Island was without a doubt the highlight for me. A secluded little island (bet you’ll never guess what it’s built on!) with a bunch of really nice scenery and great music that has that palpable Mitsuda insp. My favourite part was definitely all of the quests that related to Dunarith, as he had so much more going on in his backstory than I initially thought. I was genuinely invested, and looked forward to playing during quiet moments at work and fitting in a quick half hour or so before bed. I don’t know if I should spoil what goes on in his quests, in case anyone reading would like to play and experience for themselves first, so I won’t say anything. One thing though, during the climax of the story mission regarding Dunarith, I was a bit :/// at how quickly the ‘issue’ was ‘resolved,’ it was really showing the lite in jrpg-lite to just whip out the tragedy and not let it sink in or breathe because the plot needs to be resolved by the end of the mission so the subsequent ones can follow through. If you can figure out this attempt at crypticness; it felt like it was trying to set up an event similar to ct’s most memorable moment, but without any of the time left for it to feel real, so the impact was lost. I’m just going to pretend in my mind that the impact was there, because honestly that’s my only main gripe with it, and I recognise that it’s very much an issue born from the fact that this is a lite game designed for mobile/ios. For the most part, it really felt like the developers of this game really refined things (at least narratively) from the first part, and crafted a plot that I was consistently more interested in! That in and of itself is a feat, as this has just turned into a very casual and almost idle game that I leave to auto play sidequests with minimal input from myself so I can grind and unlock the quests I’m actually interested in. To have a main story mission that was so consistent and interesting to follow, at least for myself, has me appreciating this game more than I did for prior chunks.

However, there is one thing I want to bring up that’s really left a sour taste on all that goodness. Right now, I’m soft locked out of progressing in not one but two quests I REALLY want to see through. The first is the main quest, I believe it’s the part that will wrap up/link to/start part 3 of the main story- so to be soft locked fucking sucks! There was never any indication that you’d need to upgrade certain party members via tomes (magic bs thingies you have to grind for that are rng drops in the End of Time rip off) and I had been grinding idly for MONTHS trying to get a tome for one character that I never use anymore cause she’s annoying and is not powerful enough to compare with my mains. I just couldn’t progress the story until a character I’ve outgrown was levelled up, and it wasn’t even clear to me how to get the tome in the first place. And let me tell you, the wiki’s are confusing and the reddit help threads aren’t all that helpful either lol. And all that grinding… to only get through like 3 chapters and find out I have to grind more for another character who is even more annoying that I dropped near the start of the game. Like!? This is a gatcha game, I’ve got like 50+ party members to choose from, and I have like 10 that are really powerful that I swap out, with my main 6 staying very consistent cause they’re so strong. Why do I give a fuck about some old one that I didn’t even like, and why do I have to grind forever while the game consistently refuses to give me the one tome I need. I have everything else I need to upgrade the shit robot girl. JUST NOT HER TOME. Sighhhhhhhhhhhh

I’m currently trying to blast through some major side missions/other crossover type thingies (?) because apparently you get a better chance for the tome through that. Fingers crossed, cause idgaf about the really long side mission I’m currently on lmao. 

That brings me to the second thing I’m soft locked out of currently- which is this one wild side mission that I at first didn’t care about, but then came to get fairly invested. I didn’t care at first because it was about a bunch of religious missionaries from a church who vary in mild to moderate levels of being annoying, and I mainly picked up the quest because it was a great way to get heaps of the in-game currency I was trying to save up. As I played, there was a guy who fell from the sky, landed with amnesia, and then through some events you find that there’s a cultish group behind the straying church morals, and they try to get rid of the religious missionary figures that I mentioned earlier. In a panic, the guy who fell from the sky somehow uses crazy magical powers through his instinct/muscle memory, and it ends up rewinding time. He uses this to his advantage to save them, and then some stuff happened that I kinda forgot and they go to ‘heaven’ for a bit where they meet the angels who I’m pretty sure wrote the religious texts the missionaries based their faith on. Like, it was pretty cool, I'm a bit of a sucker for fantasy religion vs cult stuff. And I can’t remember most of it because I played it mid last year and got soft locked out right as it was getting to new heights of interesting because I haven’t progressed far enough in the main game. The main game that I can’t progress cause I haven’t upgraded a character I don’t give two shits about. AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

Conyum - https://youtu.be/6O3FefCeQRk?t=642 

I was going to just play to max out Kid and Serge (and a few other faves like Dunarith) to see their stories to the end and hopefully have a bit of idle fun before putting it down for good, but I found myself pleasantly surprised and drawn in by a few stand out moments, and I look forward to seeing if there’s anything more like that. I at least want to see the end of that religious mission, but what sucks is that it’s been so long and I’ve done so many other quests and missions that I’m hazy and forgetting so much of it, and it’s REALLY hard to find lore recaps for this game lol. Sucks. I hope I can at least replay the mission when I’ve finished it, cause I want to pick up on the details now that I know it’s worth slogging through the stuff I didn’t care about in the beginning.

Also, the music and art is consistently really nice, so yee haw. The game may not be perfectly aligned to all my tastes and preferences, and I often find myself uninterested or eye rolling at some classic Kato choices for story, but the sheer amount of content put into this mobile game is really something! I haven’t paid a cent and there’s been a good couple hours of genuinely fun and enjoyable moments for me- well worth it! 

Serpent’s Neck Igoma - https://youtu.be/6O3FefCeQRk?t=1056 

Palace of the Sea Goddess - https://youtu.be/6O3FefCeQRk?t=3385 

~~~

Radical Dreamers HD

Wow! The first Chrono game to make the list since I started doing these!!

In all honesty, I want to play through the chrono games with these lists in mind and make an attempt of actually articulating what I love (and don’t love) about them in a more in depth manner, similar to my resi branches.

I also only played one full go of RD when it came to switch, so I feel I can’t fully talk about it anyway. So, this will be a shallow gush instead :P

So! Chrono Cross HD with the first official Eng translation of Radical Dreamers! That was unexpected and very surprising! I never thought we’d be getting new Chrono content after all these years, especially not an official crossover in Another Eden (that had great voice acting for Serge and Kid btw!) and a HD game! I’m full autism for Chrono Trigger, then Radical Dreamers (and I guess Cross… it makes me a bit cranky but now that there’s this shiny new HD release I can dust off my switch and play with the most neutral-to-positive stance I can manage!) So let me tell you, it was soooooo nice to play RD in my bed! It was winter and I had just moved house a month or two prior and even though uni was really hectic, I played over 2-3 nights to complete the first playthrough. It was so cosy to play, all wrapped up in bed with a hot chocolate and the nostalgia I had for this game being awakened. 

There’s a specific vibe to RD that I really enjoy, it’s just kind of eerie and unsettling, but so full of charm and wit and I fucking adore it. Although there are honestly a lot of plot points and references and what have you that allude to implications that absolutely butcher ct, it is a little easier for me to overlook them in favour of enjoying what this game has to offer. (I find it much harder to overlook these kinds of narrative choices in CC, because, well… reasons. I’ll go in depth another time) I love the trio dynamic, Kid is a sassy bogan, Serge is such a loveable denim dumbass and quintessential Boy™, and Magil is the reluctant adult supervision who barely supervises. Joking aside, I genuinely do enjoy the way the trio bounce off each other, and it’s great to have it framed through Serge’s pov. It makes me so sad that due to the experimental nature of this game, and how short it is, that Kato tried to distance himself and overcorrect things that weren’t necessarily issues and went overboard with CC. There is a certain magic here that captivated me, and despite it definitely not being the sequel I wanted, it’s better than the sequel we ‘got’ (in my opinion) and I’d highly recommend people interested by either CT or CC give this a fair go. And go more in depth and try to complete the multiple endings too, I haven’t finished all of them but there are some classic things that happen and gahhh this game is really fun in spite of and because of it’s weirdness and divergence from CT.

Day of Summer - https://youtu.be/iIHDQ0FONik 

Gale - https://youtu.be/G7687ikwhao 

Final Confrontation - https://youtu.be/Eo1r_BapDP8

~~~

Solitaire

I just have so many hours on this that it deserves a special mention. Shout out to Solitaire!

No music recs, cause there isn’t a soundtrack… so……. Go listen to your favourite Jazzy album! And if you don’t have one, listen to this or this >:)

~~~

Tetris 3DS

What is there to say? It’s tetris, but on the 3DS. I think the one I play is something weird like Tetris Ultimate 3D something, but my DS is in my room and I’m not getting up from my computer to go check lol. 

Controls are refined, it’s nice to be able to slam down the tetrominoes quickly, and holding one in reserves is fun and changes the way you strategise. I don’t really strategise tho, I just play this the way I play solitaire. Brain off, I’m tryna relaxxxxx

I bet you could hum the tetris theme from memory, so go ahead and sing that to yourself as my music rec. Totally not cause I play the game muted while I’m watching youtube or something. Of course not.

~~~

Star Realms (Mobile)

I played the mobile version of this quite a bit this year, mainly when my dad or sibling are in town. We usually play for a few days online after they’ve gone back home too, but I got busy with uni so I didn’t play much on my own. 

There are campaigns to learn and master the various decks, so it’s interesting trying out the decks I don’t have to see what they’re all about. I still have no idea how to use the deck my dad likes to play with, but my favourite deck is Colony Wars, and I have a physical copy of it and no one to play with :’’’’(

No music rec for this either cause I play muted… so uhhhhh… listen to the nearest sci-fi sound to you!

~~~

Bug Fables

Ahh Bug Fables. I’ve heard about this game and had it very far in my periphery for years- it’s constantly touted as The Game To Play if you’re a Paper Mario fan who yearns for the style of the earlier entries. And well, I saw it on sale on my PS4 and said fuck it. Why not?

Now, I wanna say upfront- I’m a huge fan of the Paper Mario series (despite not having played all the entries…) and I miss playing PM64, so to constantly hear this game as ‘oh yeah it’s got all the good thing of 64/ttyd and then does it better!’ made it have a lot to live up to for me. Now, I did try to go into this game as neutrally as possible, but due to hearing years of this game being built up that way, I did feel a bit disappointed that it didn’t really scratch that PM itch. Overall this was a lovely game and I enjoyed myself and will definitely replay in the future, but I found the lines between inspiration and imitation being blurred a little too frequently for my liking, and there was a certain (subjective) lack of polish that ultimately made me resent the fact that it is so closely tied to the PM games. 

The visuals are nice, the animations are good- but I don’t really care about bugs so there wasn’t really anything that charmed me the same way seeing Mario characters in the 2D paper style did. The music is generally pretty good, with a few stand out tracks I’ll be linking, but there’s a lot of tracks that sounded annoying and.. Kinda bad.. At least to me. I don’t wanna shit on the composer, because in general this is a really high quality soundtrack and I really do like a lot of the songs! But when the first two or three songs I heard in the game were annoying or sounded discordant in a bad way, I was really hesitant to push through. That, paired with little nitpicky things and the admittedly unfair comparison to PM64 had me feeling glad that I didn’t pay full price. The look and soundtrack are also HEAVILY reminiscent of the 64 style and sound, and there were some things that I felt could’ve been changed to better suit the direction they were going to make this an even more unique experience that is undeniably ‘Bug Fables.’ Little things like the xp symbol being pretty much the same as the xp in 64, but there’s a leaf in it instead of a star… Things like that, things that felt too heavily lifted from the game it’s inspired by but choosing to leave it at an imitation because hey, it worked for them!

This game was a chance to take inspiration, learn from, refine upon and build something new from the things we learn with the PM franchise. My biggest gripe with this game is that, while they do have some improvements made from systems they pinched from those games- like the side quest board allowing you to just take every open quest and attack them at your leisure instead of ttyd’s way of only letting you do one at a time -I feel a bit burned by the fact that it relies on PM so much. I really wonder if this game would be half as fun to people who have never played a PM game, and if they’d understand the mechanics and gameplay and such for this game on its own. I often found myself thinking 'is this really the best decision for this game, or are they banking on my nostalgia for a different game to make me like this game more?' I also didn’t know how small the studio was that made this game, so while I recognise that there are limits and that a more indie studio can’t compare to the same level of polish and character as a AAA like Nintendo; I do wanna end my feeling of gripes on something like… Yeah, you made a great game! But! Did you really do all you could to cultivate the unique feeling you wanted for your game, or were you relying on my knowledge and experience of PM to charm me into enjoying this?

I know that’s kind of mean and a very harsh critique, but I wanted to get that out of the way so I could gush about what I genuinely enjoyed. Cause this game is great, I just feel it wasn’t the next step for me as a fan of PM, and that it has linked itself too closely with it.

So, onto the nicer stuff. This game was really fun! I enjoyed that fact that the main party is a trio, and it just stays as that trio for the whole game. It made it so tight in character development and really allowed me to get to know these characters and enjoy their dynamic. I loved hearing their thoughts on each area, I loved the moments that revolved around one of the characters and showed how the other two supported them through those points in the story. I also liked seeing the way they interacted with the NPCs you see frequently, the world does have a charm all of it’s own (just not one that I resonated with/felt too deeply)

The party consists of Kabbu, the green one, Vi, the yellow one, and Lief, the blue one. Ok, there is more to them than just their colours- Kabbu is a classic kind hearted and honourable type, Vi is hot headed and has that ego that rebellious young kids/tweens have, and Lief is a little more reserved, but witty and cheeky in his own way. The point of the game is to journey across the land and gather artifacts for Queen Elizant to reveal the Everlasting Sapling. There are a lot of different bug kingdoms, and a nice amount of side quests to help flesh out said kingdoms. The more you play, the more you gain an understanding of the politics between the kingdoms, and to what lengths various leaders will go to for the sapling. Lots of stuff happens, I don’t want to go in depth here because I think the way the game reveals certain plot points was generally paced well, and if you haven’t played this game for yourself, I’d recommend going in as blind as you can. If you’re hesitant, let me just say, that even though I was battling my own snooty bias towards PM, I really loved getting to know all 3 characters as they all have interesting backstories that intertwine with the overall narrative, and the more you dig around and try to find out about the world, the stranger/more fascinating some things seem.

I can totally understand why this game has such high ratings, it is a great game and not too difficult, so I do feel that even if you’re not as familiar with this style of game, you’re sure to get something out of it and look back on it fondly. I know I’ll be having fun thinking about certain quests and plot points, and I’ve periodically come back just to play the card game tournaments because they’re simple and fun once you wrap your head around them!

I would just say… I think it was done dirty by comparing/imitating so closely to PM, and that the strong connection to it did deflate some of the experience for me. Maybe thats a personal thing, due to my love for PM and huge nostalgia for PM64 in particular, but that’s something I’d like other potential players to keep in mind. 

It’s a great game, and cause I was pretty harsh, I’m adding twice the song recs >:)

The One Left Behind (Leif's Theme) - https://youtu.be/BtrNUi4b7o0 

His Friends Call Him Spuder (Don't Call Him Spuder) - https://youtu.be/Ivv-F-q81tA 

Oh No! WASPS!! - https://youtu.be/vnguaxxXUbc 

Kut It Up! - https://youtu.be/xoTFge7b1v0 

The Sacred Hills - https://youtu.be/b_OSyr3IwAU 

Termite Capitol - https://youtu.be/oILKKd80Hyg 

~~~

Hitman Trilogy PS4 (2016-2022)

Zayum, I love dress up games!

Haha, for real, this was an unexpected favourite of the year for me. I have had so much fun the past month and a half bingeing this trilogy, and you’d think it being so recent would make it easier to talk about, right? Here’s hoping…

I had never really heard about Hitman until my friend told me about it, saying that she wanted to watch me play and that she thought I’d really enjoy it. She was right, I’ve had a blast. As I understand, this is a soft reboot for the series, but still has some lore/plot points that build off previous entries in the series. As someone who was freshly dropped into the world of Hitman through this trilogy, I was only mildly confused in the beginning, but once I started playing the campaign missions, it was relatively self contained and easy to follow along. Any info from previous entries seems to just be nods and references to things I can’t pick up on, which didn’t affect my ability to enjoy what was on offer. 

And man, there’s so much here. There’s an overarching plot across the three game’s campaigns, and I was so pleasantly surprised that not only did the main plot have rippling effects across all the missions- but things like NPC gossip too! It was fun to sneak around and gather intel or complete the story missions that help to set up opportunities to assassinate your target; I often found myself enjoying the chance to be a nosey cunt and eavesdrop on conversations and follow certain NPCs as they went about their business. The attention to detail really helped to make this world feel large and lived in, and some of the best levels have some really interesting NPC tangents that have absolutely nothing to do with the hit, but are just as memorable- if not more. Things like this guy desperately trying to assemble a desk chair at the Swedish Embassy, https://youtu.be/NayAsm80RHM some nosey party guests snooping around and conspiring as to how the occupants are able to afford all their cool stuff, and a lady with a small cupcake business who is hiding murderous tendencies https://youtu.be/0mqkRo8AKz8 - just to name a few!

In general, the main plot and methods of killing in each level are good fun, and it was interesting to follow along and get to the bottom of everything in each game. I will say, I think it’s better to look at this as a trilogy (and this was the way I was playing) as some progressions in the ‘self contained’ game chunk may feel rushed or unexpected if you try to look at it on it’s own. There were even some points when playing that I found some plot points happened or developed very quickly, and I felt a bit lost because they weren’t given enough build up or time in my opinion. A large part of what lost my ability to hold onto the plot and comprehend it was the discrepancy in the cutscenes across all 3 games. I looked into it briefly, cause halfway through 2 I thought ‘surely it can’t be this bad without reason,’ and sure enough, there was a reason! Hitman 1 was produced with Square Enix’s support, but due to the original release dropping campaign maps once every few months, it really impacted player’s ability to enjoy it to the fullest. Square pulled out and IOI [who own’s the Hitman IP] now had to make Hitman 2 with reduced staff and budget, so the nice cinematic cutscenes from 1 were now stills with slight motion graphics animation. Like… Netflix screensaver animation. I understand that lack of budget and manpower lead to this choice, but it made it incredibly difficult to feel invested or even understand what was going on half the time with the still images - ESPECIALLY when there were more than 2 people talking. There was just no easy way to set that up with the limitation they imposed on themselves for the cutscenes, which is a shame because a lot of important developments happen in them. IOI did not drip feed the campaign for 2, and when 3 came around they brought back actual cutscenes, just using the in game engine to do so. I really wish that they just used the in game engine for all of the cutscenes, because they are very short but often complex and dramatic so it’s really important to see the acting and body language they want to give the characters. Obviously they wouldn’t have had the foresight to know Square would drop them and they’d have to continue making a AAA game as an independent studio/look for other publishers, but it just is such a shame that the plot of 2 was quite important but ultimately feels like a black hole to me because I struggled to understand the cutscenes. As I understand, there were also issues when 3 launched that made it difficult to link the levels for 1&2 into 3, where they intended for 3 to be the main hub to access the entire trilogy. Shit move, and I won’t really talk about it cause I wasn’t there to experience it, but I suggest looking into it more if you’re so inclined because it is sadly interesting to see what a mess it was. What I did experience from this mess was that, when the trilogy pack was on sale on the PS4,  I decided to buy it and was so filled with dread to only see Hitman 3 downloading, thinking I clicked the wrong thing or got scammed (cause there are like a bajillion hitman expansions/access passes in the store, it’s so confusing!) BUT LUCKILY Hitman 1&2 are treated like access passes and in the game. 

(Also there was no where nice to squeeze this in BUT even in the big budget cutscenes from 1, there were discrepancies in audio that I noticed. Maybe this is just because I'm a recently graduated film bro™ so I'm primed to keep an ear out, but just listen to the last cutscene in Hitman 1. The two voice actors were recorded in different studios and the quality gap is noticeable! Dianna sounds nice and crisp as always, but the constant sounds like he recorded in a make shift booth or was in his wardrobe and the mixers forgot to do dynamics processing!)

Another point of contention, and one that almost made me annoyed enough to not have a good time, is the fact that it requires me to be online. For anything to count, that is. There are offline options for main campaigns, but so much of the peripheral content to play has online as mandatory to even load it - and if you play through a main mission offline, any skills/missions/achievements ect you unlocked DO NOT COUNT and are not saved. Meaning that you effectively played for nothing. WHAT THE HELL. This is a single player game, I am alone on my couch playing by myself, and I still need to be consistently online in order to actually play. It is really fun seeing the end screen after a mission where you are greeted with a whole screen full of achievements and story missions to aim for, and when you’re offline you don’t get that because your progress didn’t count. THIS is one of the EXACT things that’s made me feel incredibly disillusioned and pretty much loathe the current gaming landscape. Sure, I’ve had my fun with some modern titles, and I really have been enjoying my PS4 these past couple of years, but come onnnnnnnnnn. Do you remember when you’d get a game, and just put it in? And you could start playing? Stick that cartridge in the console and you’ve got an experience waiting for you? Even moving to bigger games, the most you’re waiting before you can play is just for creating save data so you can record your progress. Modern games requiring you to install a bunch of shit and wait around for sometimes hours to be able to open it and actually start playing, only to then find that the servers are having a tantrum and don’t want to host your game… Makes me regret being a gamer in all honesty. And it feels like the biggest slap to the face when I encounter this kind of thing in a SINGLE PLAYER GAME with MINIMAL TO NO ONLINE ELEMENTS. If I didn’t have such a great time while playing the Hitman trilogy, this would’ve been a massive deal breaker to me. And I only seemed to drop from servers when I’d left the game paused for too long, so the servers are more stable than they seemed to be at launch. That makes me glad that I generally play behind the curve lmao.

Anyway, those big gripes aside, the actual gameplay of Hitman was fun enough that I was able to put aside what would otherwise be deal breakers for me. The stealth and spy aspects of this game were incredible, and felt rewarding and open enough that it truly felt at times that I could do anything. It wasn’t often that I felt lost or unsure of what to do, because even when I was lost, I could usually just wander around the level and eavesdrop until I heard something useful (or entertaining) or saw a new method of getting to where I wanted to go. It felt like a sandbox, a miniature open world for me to do whatever I wanted to; as long as I completed my mission. As I’ve only really played one other stealth game, and was largely unfamiliar with the style of gameplay, I played through the whole game on the casual mode- however now that I am more than familiar with how the game plays and starting to challenge my understanding of the mechanics with the escalation contracts, I look forward to the increased difficulty of professional and master mode.

Some of these worlds felt so elaborate and alive, and it scratches a particular kind of itch to go through the entire level and find new shortcuts and paths to places as I get intimate with the area. Levels like Sapienza, Whittlehorn Creek, Isle of Sgail and Dartmoor were personal favourites, though I enjoyed the majority of maps. Wandering around the city as various types of people, seeing where I could fit in and go unnoticed and seeing current events based on previous hits I did was fun as fuck. The Dartmoor level, which I suspect is a fan favourite, was a great shake up on the formula as it provides an opportunity for you to disguise yourself as a PI and investigate a murder mystery- interviewing suspects, inspecting crime scenes and suspects’ private rooms, and framing who you want as the culprit was super fun! So much of this game was just fun! As serious as some missions are, with eerie tones that really add an unsettling and sometimes downright disturbing implication, there are almost always silly things to do as well for when you just want to have some fun! Agent 47 didn't really talk much in the first game, but in the second and third he talks a lot more and it was interesting seeing just how seriously he takes his job… sometimes getting way too into it. Like, dancing in the flamingo mascot costume, stealing the clothes off the lead model and getting your makeup done so you can walk the runway, and giving some of the funniest and strangest dialogue when he is undercover as a real estate agent or giving a tour of a winery. The possibilities really feel endless, and I'm constantly impressed with the way the developers managed to balance everything for various gameplay styles.

There were, however, some maps that weren’t as fun for me- mainly military heavy ones. I know that a great deal of what I’ve said I enjoyed about this game is the fact that you can sneak around and snoop, but the sneaking and snooping in military levels (and ones that, while not explicitly military, feel like it with the sheer amount of security guards and their ranks) straight up sucks! When I was playing, I was often replaying the same level over and over to see all the main story missions, and sometimes just wander around the levels and try to see everything I could. When I first got to a military level, I found myself so bored by it that I did not replay it, and I stopped replaying levels over and over and just played once through to see the story to the end. I have completed the trilogy, but I feel much closer to 1 at this stage cause I am most familiar with those levels. It’s a shame the military levels affected me in that way, but I’m going to hope that based on my experience enjoying the early levels in 1 the more I played them, that I’ll have just as much fun getting to know the other levels while I keep playing over new years. 

Another nitpick I think is worth mentioning, is that sometimes the game glitched out and made certain story missions unplayable for me, which was a shame. There were multiple times where things just wouldn’t register, or the NPCs would break and just stand still somewhere, or loop in their actions and not give me an opportunity to do what the game wanted me to do. It really sucked having to try reload saves or even having to restart levels because of glitches like that, but due to the nature of this game having multiple routes to achieve your goals, it wasn’t so bad. Oh and while I'm nitpicking - while it was great to be able to adjust the UI so that I could actually see the button prompts in game, I couldn't adjust the font size for the mission briefings while I was planning the missions. You'd think I could read the text on the tv while my couch isn't even that far away from it, but I constantly had to sit up and scootch to the edge of my seat to read, and even then the text was so small and had barely any spacing between words that I struggled to read anyway. Makes it apparent that it was made with PC in mind first, as that wouldn't be such an issue when the screen is centimetres away from your face, but zayum I came here to play dress ups and kill people, not strain my eyes :(

Another thing I haven't even touched on yet is the music! While there's plenty of diegetic music, the soundtrack itself is pretty great. The drawn out sounds of the strings really builds up that slinky mood, and are quite iconic sounding. A lot of the classical sounds feels like an homage to classic spy movies too, and that's hard to miss when there's a few heavy handed visual allusions drawn as well haha. One thing I really love in the soundtrack is the choir, the addition of vocals like that makes it sound almost religious at times, which is very dramatic, especially paired with the strings! It's quite a beautiful soundtrack, and it feels very cohesive across the trilogy without it taking attention away from the gameplay- which is quite impressive to me that it was pulled off this way! A stealth game by design requires you to focus more on your mission, and a poor or even mediocre choice in music can ruin the mood and experience, so to have such a classical and dramatic soundtrack NOT feel intrusive to my gameplay was awesome.

I’m finding it really difficult to articulate much more about this trilogy, because I’m still in the high of hyperfixation that’s bringing a lot of subjectivity to this look back (more than I aim for :P) I enjoyed the plot being connected and overarching even though it wasn't that deep, and there were some absolutely stand out levels that were so interesting in both a gameplay and worldbuilding manner that I enjoyed myself immensely. I don’t think I can really expand much more on the plot or gameplay as everything is a jumbled mess in my brain while I’m riding this high- so perhaps after I’ve put this down and come back in a year or two, I can write something better after having some space and this to compare my future thoughts to. 

If you’re into stealth games, being a nosey cunt, or being bald- I highly recommend checking this trilogy out. A great draw to this is that, even if you simply watch a handful of different people playing, you’re sure to have a different experience every time due to the sheer amount of possibilities there are! I had a great time, and if you choose to look into this game more or play yourself, I hope you have a great time too. I think I just need to wait a while and have some distance from this game before I can say anything more in depth- as if this isn’t already paragraphs long :P

Showstopper https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BBw4Kh30pOc&t=178s 

Approaching Storm https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BBw4Kh30pOc&t=6445s 

Severing Strings https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BBw4Kh30pOc&t=10301s 

Invitation to Dance https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BBw4Kh30pOc&t=10749s 

[weirdmarioenemies]

Name: Chikako (again)

Debut: Super Mario Land

Lately, I have realized something. I have been doing some thinking. And I have realized that I don’t think about Chikako nearly enough. I don’t think about it, like, ever! It’s my namesake here, and I take it for granted! I do love it, don’t get me wrong, but it’s not my FAVORITE enemy, and maybe if I were to do this again, I would have chosen Wallop or Chuckya. That doesn’t mean I don’t still love Chikako, though, and it is still so special to me! So here I go, over three years since the last time I talked much about it!

Chikako is a funny screen-face robot, which is a kind of robot I really do treasure dearly, though I may not express it often. There is something about its face being displayed on a screen that is so charming to me! Like, it could be displaying ANYTHING on there, but it is programmed to, or even CHOOSES to display a face. I guess I’m not sure exactly what an enemy robot would display otherwise, to be fair. Maybe a big ol’ exclamation point to show it means business, or text saying “get outta here”, or even a bunch of small text, to lure its prey in close to read it, so it can get them!

Chikako doesn’t do that, though. It displays its face, and its face... is sad. And that’s strange! Enemies are supposed to look mean! They’re not supposed to look sad... are they? This doesn’t look like a Bad Guy who you should want to defeat! This looks like something you would want to rescue FROM a Bad Guy! Chikako would be like a Jinjo!

Does this look more like an enemy? I guess it does. But overall, maybe this doesn’t actually matter. Because in game, Chikako looks like this:

It is just a handful of pixels! I could hold these pixels in my hand, and theoretically snack on them quite easily. These pixels have no character or personality whatsoever, and Chikako, please do not be sad about me saying that! It is not you, it’s the resolution, and the compliments are around the corner! Basically, if I did not know about the official art, I would not interpret this as an enemy at all, but just an Obstacle, like those sparkly things in Balloon Fight, and hey wait a minute maybe Chikako is based on them!

But anyway, the official art is what makes Chikako so special! I love the design philosophies of an Enemy, but this seems like an obstacle that was later interpreted into a creature, and that is so wonderful. They gave it a sad face, not to communicate anything in-game, but just because they felt like it. Maybe it wishes its sprite was something more. Maybe the art is a portrait of Chikako, the moment it saw how it would be portrayed in game. (Chikako is real)

Here is the image of Chikako again to make this more visually interesting. There are not any other official images of Chikako. But let’s appreciate that it’s a diamond shape instead of the more conventional square! It’s probably a limitation of the sprite size and shape, and it leads to something more interesting than it would have been anyway! This is always such a neat phenomenon to me. It makes me want to make tiny sprites to see how they can lead to designs!

I want to end this post with a different Chikako image. A more accurate one!

I think Chikako deserves to smile, because it has a lot to be happy about, and it has brought me so much to be happy about, too! From the very beginning of this blog, Chikako has represented me as I wrote funny stuff alongside a Best Friend Ever, and continued to write more funny stuff and meet even more Best Friends Ever! Thank you to everyone who has read our posts and followed our blog, and supported us for over three years! Yowza! 

And also: do not worry! These posts do not mean we’re ending or anything. It’s just that Mod F Boy’s latest post made me think “that is so true” and that I should do it too. So yes! Thank you!

[girlfriendsofthegalaxy]

tuesday again 2/22/22

what a pleasing date! a twosday, even! one of my favorite coworkers is getting married today in a botanical garden and i send good wishes from afar!

also, lots of short things this week bc a bitch is having some Medication Side Effects i need to tough out a bit longer before this doc will be convinced they are adversely affecting my life

listening orville peck has a new EP out but none of the songs have really latched themselves onto the black matter of my brain yet. my sister sent me a tiktok that had me in hysterics and ended up having a full version, great beeps and bloops, we sing “pull up a stepladder and give me a peck” when her cats are yelling at her from the floor now

reading fallow week

watching the cuphead show. my boss and i keep very close tabs on video games media efforts, and i’m not like contractually obliged here on this blog or in my actual dayjob (thank god) to watch every piece of video games media, but boy do i love to give opinions on it.

my dad’s side of the family has very strong subspecialities and opinions about different areas of film history, bc they’re all engineers and designers and married other engineers and designers. my favorite uncle veered really hard into the history of animation, like The Thing To Do when you visited him was sit in the pool until you got unrecognizably pruny and then huddle under a blanket in the air conditioning watching looney tunes in chronological order. so i cracked this childrens show open like WHEE a fun tribute to early animation!

in general, i find the first episode of the cuphead show to have a really unnerving combination of some of the rubber-hose early-animation style with modern adult animated american television facial expressions and dialogue. it has shot sequences, shooting angles, and moving background elements that felt very modern and jarring to me. the opening titles are killer (probably bc they’re done by an entirely different team)! the watercolor backgrounds are lovely! the devil’s song and dance number was fun to watch! everything else i don’t really care for and so i will not be giving it the ol three-episode try. the second episode has a “whoops some irresponsible kids have to take care of a baby!” shit and i fucking hate that trope. if anyone’s watched it straight through, let me know if it’s worth gritting my teeth to see the cab-calloway-inspired character’s walk cycle or nah

reading interviews it sounds like it was underfunded, a lot of “well here’s where we had to lean on the magic of netflix technology to cut corners”, which is a real shame- it could have been a lovely throwback and tribute to early animation and a really interesting intro to new generations without insane uncles. IF they got the money to really lean into the 2D aspect of it, given that the game was so lovingly hand-animated and is still memorable years after release in a very crowded genre FOR that art style. shame this childrens show was not the thing i, a sophisticated adult, was looking for, glad studio mdhr got that fat fat netflix check even if i think it’s a poor likeness of uhhh Their Game. always fun to keep an eye on netflix’s newest video game transmedia efforts, even if it’s weird that both castlevania and arcane have been widely praised for their animation and this one simply doesn’t hold a fuckin candle imo. part of that is different teams, part of that is they’re less willing to spend money on their more explicitly kids stuff, wish it was different, what can ya do

playing junk shop telescope by cephalopodunk, a free short in-browser bitsy game tagged not-exactly-sure-how-a-telescope-works with exactly one mechanic, and it does glorious things with that one mechanic. it’s so clearly signposted, i never got lost or turned around or stuck, mwah. love space, love pixels, the ending screen actually made me gasp so i’ll forgive it for straying very close to a specific conspiracy theory i had to debunk constantly at the astronomy tour internship.

how did i find this: on the itch.io recs page of a different game maker i like, after i struck out sifting through the free + browser + recent + popular intersection of tags. do wish itch let you exclude tags. i will never want to play a horror game in my life. bio/shock was pushing it

making i’ve been thinking a lot lately about how difficult any given long-running podcast is to get into. there’s an expectation of prior knowledge about injokes and references by episode 100, i think, and it’s hard to know what a good entry point is.

so i’m going to explain what the fuck “the wives” and “the boys” and “cowboyblogging” is, since i spent a good portion of last year in no fit state to do much of anything and it’s been kind of iffy so far this year also but i’ve looped back all the way around to productive procrastination on hobbies instead of productive procrastination on life shit.

coming up on three years ago, i watched the entire dollars trilogy movies (for a fistful of dollars, for a few dollars more, the good the bad and the ugly) with an upsettingly high fever and wrote a fic where i put the horrible men (angel, blondie, and tuco) into the postapocalyptic roleplaying video game fallout: new vegas (where in my version, the best version, the player character “the courier” is married to a pair of butch mechanic assassins veronica and christine). i have almost no memory of writing that original first fic, but it did spawn a much much larger fic (”The” cowboyfic, if you will) unpacking what exactly happens post-game and what happens when you get everything you think you want and some stuff about the fall of empires and capitalism.

this fic assumes some degree of knowledge of at least one of these properties. there is a dramatic difference between my writing ability of three years ago, when the tuesdayposts weren’t even a thing yet, and my writing abilities now where i give opinions about data for a living. there are only like half a dozen people i shout to about this thing. this is purely to amuse myself. i encourage you, the reader, to block the “cowboyblogging” and “ain’t that a kick in the head” tags if you’ve been reading this like “okay now i know what she’s talking about and i’ve decided i do not wish to see this content, why have there been no textile crimes yet this year”. i’m dealing with clothes moths right now it gives me the serotonin to make the horrible men pine and the bisexual/lesbian trio be disgustingly happy.

if you’d like to dip in anyway, good news! i didn’t put out a new chapter but i did double the length of the previous chapter and am working on this whole fucking project in a much more serious and sustained way (i say, knocking on wood).

[innuendostudios]

Thoughts on... some funny games

[no spoilers to speak of]

Thoughts on Lair of the Clockwork God

The wisdom of the gaming cognoscenti insists that comedy is hard to do in video games. Having grown up with Monkey Island and Zork, I've never found this convincing. But one true thing is this: it's hard to write about comedic games. The ineffability of humor is hard enough to describe in less-interactive media; I can't even explain to my partner why Gretchen saying "I met January Jones once!" on You're the Worst busted me up, and they were sitting right next to me when she said it. Throw in the "you had to be there" nature of the player's active participation and I lose myself in a cornfield. The thing I found hilarious might come a beat to early for you, or not at all, or not be funny in text like it is in gameplay.

Why did I like Lair of the Clockwork God? It made me laugh.

The premise and particulars are a lot of "that could go either way." Ben and Dan - stars of Ben There, Dan That and Time Gentleman, Please! - have returned. Ben is still an adventure game star, but Dan has adopted platforming mechanics in an attempt to get with the times. So playing the game involves switching back and forth between a character who can leap across canyons but can't pick up items or talk to people, and one who can combine inventory but can't climb over a 3-pixel rock.

Does that sound potentially funny? Potentially grating? Yes to both!

The plot centers around our heroes trying to save the world from several simultaneous apocalypses and having to teach human emotions to a supercomputer in order to do so. (Don't ask.) These means, rather like Ben There, Dan That, traipsing through a number of fantasy worlds (read: computer simulations) until the correct emotion is provoked. This requires cross-genre cooperation: finding ways to get Ben to areas only Dan can access, getting Dan new power ups by combining objects in Ben's inventory (an act Dan insists on calling "crafting").

The best bits are at these intersections, when Dan's platforming is the puzzliest and Ben's puzzles take advantage of Dan's skills. Periodically the game gives you a Dan-centric platforming gauntlet the controls are NOT precise nor pleasant enough for, or a Ben-only moon logic puzzle that leaves you googling the walkthrough.

But I liked it! A lot. The genre-hopping seems to have invigorated the developers, Ben Ward and Dan Marshall. I discussed my favorite joke in Ben There, Dan That (in what is probably the least popular video I've ever made that wasn't asking for money), but was also dismayed that the game was never that clever again. But this one is, several times over! Progression here involves cheating your way to a better respawn zone, goofing around in game menus, exploiting "glitches," exiting out and loading up entirely other games. There is a lot of poking and prodding at what a game of this nature can or should be.

But, honestly? The only real selling point is... it was funny. The humor is as anarchic and metatextual as in previous titles, but it feels good-natured in a way BT,DT didn't. And there are, here and there, little bits of meat on its bones - the characters wondering if, as a couple thirtysomething white guys, the world hasn't left them behind, no longer comfortable with the juvenile humor of their youth but not really understanding the youth of today, but having not yet fully escaped the mentalities they used to hold. (There's an unspoken humor to Dan's idea of "modern" gameplay being 2D platforming mechanics, especially at a time when adventure games are significantly more popular than on his last outing; this is a good joke whether or not it's intentional.)

Also: this game contains the most poignant urinating-on-a-grave puzzle in gaming history, and you may quote me on that.

Having finished it months ago, I can't even remember what all the gags were that tickled me at the time. Comedy fades from memory faster than drama or frustration. Mostly I just remember having a good time.

Thoughts on The Darkside Detective

Here's a hook: sometime after the mayhem ends in Ghostbusters, The Exorcist, Evil Dead 2, or some other paranormal blockbuster that you watched over and over in the 90's until the VHS wore out, some overworked detective has to come into your town and piece together what the hell happened.

This is his story.

It's a good gag, and the devs wring every drop from it. Existing in a world where these things are commonplace and you have to fit them into some notion of "police procedure" is just funny. Like, it's one thing to have a running gag where you keep observing the moon in outdoor scenes, commenting, with increasing hostility, that its behavior is suspicious (it has been present at multiple crime scenes); it's a slightly different thing when, given the things you've encountered, the moon being the Big Bad is actually somewhat possible.

The game is divided into six main cases and three bonus DLC missions (which come included in the base game now, and the third of which is the proper ending/setup for the sequel). You are the cop tasked to deal with The Other Side - and, when The Other Side bleeds into our own world, its cops have to deal with you. You have a sidekick with a mental maturity of about 6, which I guess makes you the straight man. (You have to grade on a curve to find a straight man in this game.) And you solve tasks like rounding up escaped gremlins or finding an AWOL lake monster all juxtaposed with mundane problems like inter-office squabbles and having not bought your Christmas presents early enough. It's (pleasantly) lo-res and sparsely isolated, so the dialogue and premise do most of the work, but they are ably up to the task.

The gameplay... not so much. I'm an adventure game lifer, so I can put up with a lot of nonsense. It's mostly straightforward inventory puzzles and occasional minigames. Most of the puzzles are fine enough. As the cases progress, things get more involved, and the DLCs especially involve some awful moon logic. And the minigames are not above using that same jumping peg puzzle you've solved in a dozen other games already. So gameplay ranges from serviceable to irritating, but it mostly exists to string together funny lines and silly images. (Christmas mall elves being secretly in service to Krampus - that's the kind of thing we're talking about here.) You won't feel much guilt for opening up a walkthrough; the puzzles aren't why you're here.

The sequel has just been released, and both games are cheap, so check them out if you feel like smiling.

Thoughts on The Procession to Calvary

It's rare for a game to be hilarious to look at.

The Procession to Calvary takes its name from the Bruegel painting. It also takes all it's graphics from Renaissance oil paintings, and the designer delights in making famously rendered heroes and religious icons steal, stab, fart, and swear.

A strong Terry-Gilliam-with-After-Effects vibe is what we're describing.

You play as a lady knight from a war that's just ended, which sucks for you because, in this age of peace, you're no longer authorized to kill. And killing's, like, you're whole thing. But the one person your new, pacifist king wouldn't stop you from killing is the warlord you just deposed, who fled to the South. So you embark on a nonsensical journey to seek out the one human on Earth you are authorized to kill, because killing is just The. Best. Ever.

Of the three games we're discussing, this is the most overtly cheeky, and, at times, the most scatological. I could've done with a bit less scatology, if I'm being honest, but the cheekiness is very winning. As with Lair of the Clockwork God, a lot of jokes could go either way - a field of people being tortured and a woman on a blanket selling commemorative torture merch could be painfully try-hard. But something about the victims being seemingly everyone ever crucified or broken on the wheel in a famous painting, and having them writhe on their crosses in a way that is both gruesome and goofy, and having a cacophonous soundtrack of their screams and moans that you will now imagine every time you look at one of those elegantly elegiac paintings from now on... it works. That the music score is being played by an extremely jaunty piper who dances behind you just out of sword's reach as you traverse the field pushes it over the top.

Oh, and the puzzles, while never hair-pullingly obtuse, will leave you stumped at times. Push past that to get the proper ending, but, if you're sick of trying, you can, at any point, just start stabbing your way through problems. Which, again: it takes a very deft touch to make "protagonist resorts to violence" actually funny rather than lazy and obvious. And maybe, in another game, the perfect timing of every animation, the clever quips, the careful contrast of cathedrals and high-society music halls with gleeful sword-swinging wouldn't be enough. But something about it being frickin' Renaissance paintings carries it the last mile.

This is probably the basest game of the three, but it's also the one that made me giggle the most. Having a BFA that required several art history classes may have something to do with it. But check this thing out.

[sakuatsu]

YELL 2 ME ABT SAKUATSU FIC RECS PLS

oh boy. oh boy do i have much to talk about

here’s a list of my sakuatsu must-reads under the cut! complete with links, word count, ratings, and occasional commentary because i’m incapable of shutting up. this isn’t in any particular order either 

(keeping this sfw and organized into canonverse/AUs. a * means i am on my hands and knees begging for you to read this)  

i’ll try to update this somewhat regularly :]

most recently updated august 25, 2020!

canonverse:

*your highs and lows (series) by astroeulogy 

a post-time skip canonverse series born from these two questions:

1. what if sakusa kiyoomi, known too-blunt jerk, is equally straightforward about his soft, tender feelings?

2. what if miya atsumu, resident big fat jerk who doesn't care if his teammates hate him, is too emotionally stunted to notice when his one of his teammates actually likes him?

this is like the sakuatsu series but it’s blasphemous to not recommend. the first fic in the series is all that you were (4.6k, T). mind the ratings on a few of the fics, but my personal favorite is #3: a masterpiece of domesticity called you have tamed me (5.7k, T). these make me ACHE 

*sakuatsu domesticity simulator by pseudoanalytics (T)

a vaguely interactive mixture of fic, art, and html, where you too can experience the inherent romance of a big fat jerk and a too-blunt jerk attempting intimacy

this fic...this fic...op is literally one of my favorite artists of all time but Did You Know that their writing is also off the charts. what a wonderful use of second person and the pacing is so good. too much skill in one person 

*The MSBY Black Jackals Read Thirst Tweets by isaksara (11.4k, M)

Sakusa’s eyes are very dark naturally, sucking in all surrounding rays of light and crushing them in his pupils. For an athlete, he is rather pale. His lips look very pink in comparison. Atsumu is suddenly catastrophically aware that in this instance, ‘accent’ is a euphemism. “Good enough for your Olympic-size ego, Miya?”

(In which Atsumu realizes that he is attracted to Sakusa Kiyoomi in the most inconvenient way possible.)

i think this is the fic that got me into sakuatsu in the first place lol i was looking very specifically for msby socmed fics and now here we are. this fic is unbelievably funny

*liminal spaces by hhatsuna (25.9k, T)

Fuck you, Atsumu thinks, pointing at the pixelated Sakusa in the grainy team photo on his bedside table.

It’s easier than you’d think to ignore loving your teammate.

*Better For Us Both by abrandnewheart (15.7k, M)

Where “You already make me the happiest guy alive, babe," gives way to, “I’ve not been happy for a while now.”

Alternatively known as the ‘mug fic’.

yes this is a breakup fic. yes im going to recommend it anyway. breakup fics usually scare me a lot but this one is too good for me to not say anything about. nuanced and delicious. i look at the mug on my desk and feel pain

dog eat dog eat dog world by perennials (8.4k, T)

You are your first and only line of defense against the universe.

Koi no Yokan; 恋の予感 by ymra (15.3k, unrated)

Wherein Sakusa dreams of his future selves and discovers a little something along the way.

autumn ends, but we remain by wolfsbvne (5.3k, T)

atsumu stares at his ceiling at 2am. he stares until he can make out designs in his popcorn ceiling. a cat there, an onigiri here, and then something that suspiciously looks like a mop of hair, triangle eyebrows, and oh those two bumps are moles right above what atsumu just mapped out as an eye.

(or, atsumu is in kind of in love. sakusa is maybe in like.)

your fingertips, branding irons by Ceryna (5.8k, T)

Between the accidental touches he's reconciled, the deliberate ones he's endured, and, from those he's built years of trust with, obliged– Kiyoomi has never wanted to let someone indulge.

Never, until Atsumu.

take what’s yours and make it mine by claudusdiei (5.9k, T)

atsumu falls in love four times in his life

(or: in which atsumu gets his heart broken twice, has the self-awareness of a sober mule and really likes yellow tulips)

every action has an equal and opposite reaction by akanemnida (10.4k, T)

Miya Atsumu gets a modeling contract with Calvin Klein, which sets Kiyoomi's heart in motion.

(Or: Sakusa Kiyoomi realizes that the rules governing the universe are absolute rubbish at explaining matters of the heart.)

*where i want to be by tookumade (8.8k, G)

In the time they’ve been teammates at the MSBY Black Jackals, Sakusa has never been to Atsumu’s place, and Atsumu has only been to Sakusa’s a few times. There’s an unspoken understanding here: that Atsumu knows him well enough to know that nobody’s house or apartment would ever really meet his ridiculously high standards, and he is most comfortable in the home he’s made for himself.

That, and, Atsumu being over at Sakusa’s means that he has to host him and do the cleaning afterwards, while Atsumu can just flit off back to his own place. So. There’s that.

Tonight. Tonight is not business as usual. Tonight is not familiar.

*san'yō expressway, 6:17 pm by yamabato (8.1k, T)

Atsumu tilts his head to watch a slice of orange light bend over the impassive planes of Sakusa’s face. He is absolutely, ruthlessly beautiful. It makes Atsumu want to punch something—put his foot through the windshield—scream, maybe.

Kiss him again, maybe.

They have 344 kilometers to figure this one out.

parallax error: angle of inclination by min_mintobe (10.8k, T)

But now there's the one person Atsumu'd promised himself never to touch. His eyes leave Atsumu breathless with guilt at seventeen, and he spends the next six years safe in the satisfaction of making things right.

Feelings, of the physical kind, and one kiss.

ft. competitive spirit, childishness, and late night conversations.

Atsumu POV.

four leaf clover by vicari_us (5.9k, T)

Once, Ushijima claimed that they ‘got lucky’. If properly honed, their body types could become near invincible weapons.

However, unlike Ushijima, Kiyoomi’s weapon required a bit more care over the years to reach the condition it had become. He was born iron, not yet forged into steel.

Exploring what it might have taken to turn a genetic mistake into an athletic miracle.

*the 28 postcards you left me by wheelspokes (8.3k, T)

Atsumu takes texting your ex to a new level by sending Sakusa postcards in Animal Crossing instead.

such a unique premise & this is so beautifully structured. stunning flow and who knew animal crossing could convey so much longing...

AUs:

Pas De Deux by hhatsuna (dancer!sakusa au: 19.0k, T)

The mystery athlete gives Kiyoomi a once over in the mirror. “Yer pretty tall,” he observes, and the twang of an accent rasps low in his throat. His brazen eyes drift to Kiyoomi’s legs, and something like exhilaration glints gold in his gaze. “Good quads, too. Ya ever played volleyball?” Ah. So it’s volleyball.

“I’m a dancer. Ballet and contemporary, mostly.”

*my love, take your time by bastigod (archaeologist!sakusa au: 9.0k, T)

There was something sublime about wandering around an empty museum. Nothing could compare to the sound of his shoes clacking against the marble floor, the morning sunlight gently streaming through the lofty windows and the peaceful solitude of ancient stone kings overseeing their silent kingdoms.

A day in the life of Doctor Kiyoomi Sakusa, Archaeologist.

i’ve literally been thinking about this fic every day since it came out. you will not find a story like this anywhere else, i guarantee you. what a clear labor of love this fic is it’s truly something so special 

three roses and a smile by strawberrycitrus (surgeon!sakusa & microbiologist!atsumu au: 19.7k, T)

“I just got this job, I’m not givin’ it up for some moral boost ‘cause I actually need to pay my rent, ya insensitive -” Atsumu waves his hands around, trying and failing to come up with the right word to convey the amount of injustice that this gaunt motherfucker has brought into his relatively simple life thus far.

“If you can’t pay your rent, go get a job at the McDonald’s over by 8th Street,” Sakusa growls, “it’ll pay more than your researcher position.”

If you even attempt assault on a coworker, forget teaching about cells - you’ll fucking be in one, Atsumu.

*Dance of the Parallax by astroeulogy (ogre spirit!sakusa au: 6.7k, T)

For the last twenty years, Atsumu’s done all that he can to break his betrothal to the ogre spirit Sakusa. If he can just make it through one more night, he’ll be free.

honestly, just read everything by astroeulogy. i’m recommending this fic in particular because it has such an ethereal voice to it. magical

across oceans, across centuries by starstrikes (pacific rim au: 20.0k, T)

Six days ago, Osamu died and left Atsumu with this: Atsumu, you have to—

(Namikira rises with the tides and rips Osamu and Vulpis Empress away in one fell swoop. Six days later, Atsumu wakes up alone in a hospital bed and learns how to swim.)

you don’t actually need to know pacrim to appreciate this. a wonderful exploration of grief and recovery. also it’s exactly 20k words which is both satisfying and terrifying 

*Notte Stellata by awkwardedgeworth (ice skating/dancing au: 20.8k, T)

"Your partner doesn't need to hold anyone's hand other than yours," Sakusa's father crouches, "And you can wear gloves."

Sakusa ponders. He hears the other skaters of rink two whiz past as they launch themselves into lifts.

"Alright," He looks up from the ice, not knowing how he'll dedicate the next couple of decades to this sport, this partnership, this boy.

what a stunning fic. a beautiful progression of sakusa & atsumu’s relationship, rife with references to real skating programs, beautifully written and structured. so full of longing i’m in mild physical pain

[vegalocity]

Comforting Hugs and (platonic) kiss on the cheek. Min Yi falls and gets a boo boo so Huntsman has to Comfort her, much to his discomfort. Cause what you wrote with Uncle Goliath was adorable so now it's Uncle Huntsys turn. - Pixel Anon

Affection meme

4. Comforting hugs

8. Kisses on cheek

Whoops i tripped and it turned into feels how'd that happen

--

Huntsman had never wanted kids. He didn’t like kids, he didn’t trust kids, Kids always seemed to be more of a pain than they were worth.

Which was why he wasn’t particularly excited when everyone found out that Syntax had a kid. Some little wannabe detective whom was barely old enough for grade school yet somehow believed she was capable of solving any mystery handed to her but still needed to hold hands with a grownup while crossing the street.

Another thing he didn’t like about kids, they didn’t even have the skills to back up their egos.

The only positive thing he could scrounge together about Syntax's Daughter for a long time was that she seemed to be a rather tough kid. Always tripping and falling and scraping herself up in ways he was (pretty sure) a lesser child would have stopped everything to cry about, brushing the dirt off of her clothes and going back to whatever she was doing. At times Syntax or her aunt needed to pull her away and tell her to bandage up her injuries first and she’d protest over it.

So he’d give her that. She was tough.

That in no way meant he was alright with babysitting just because he was the only one without any plans tonight.

He’d be completely fair and say that he expected it tpo be a quiet night. The brat was in between ‘mysteries’ and was quietly working on one of her arts and crafts projects. He’d figured they’d have no real reason to interact until she’d tell him it was about dinner time and they’d… order in or something, he didn’t know what kids liked to eat.

But that didn’t mean he was okay with it just happening to him to be stuck with the brat all night until Syntax got home from whatever tech-related insanity the Monkie Kid and his ilk had pulled him into.

Though when he heard a yelp of surprise and pain, he’d assumed it was something like, the little gremlin tripping on her own socks or something and falling face first onto the floor or whatever. So he didn’t give it any mind as he continued to sharpen his lucky blade.

Though he didn’t hear any grumbles of annoyance as she continued on with what she was doing, or even laughter at her own clumsy actions. Then she was a little blur of black hair and pink jacket as she darted from the kitchen area to the bathroom, passing by as quickly and quietly as possible.

Now… That was… probably something….

The bathroom door shut with a thud, but he could pick up on sniffling and upset whimpering noises among the sounds of bottles clattering, every so often punctuated by more yelps of pain.

Then he smelled burning. It was coming from the kitchen and sure enough there was a skillet that had fallen to the ground, and a pair of eggs half sprayed along the stovetop, some parts very quickly turning to charcoal.

What had happened put itself together rather quickly and he cursed under his breath at the idiocy of children.

When he returned to the bathroom the whimpering had ended and was replaced entirely with the sniffling, and the rummaging of bottles was replaced with the running of the faucet.

“What are ya doing in there?”

“Nothing!”

“Bull. Open the door kid.”

“It’s okay! I’m okay!”

“Open the door before I break it. Minyi.” The child’s name felt weird on his tongue, but she had to know he was serious.

There was a pause, and then the door creaked open. The kid stood there, moving her hand from the doorknob to wipe at her eyes, the other hand held behind her back.

“You’re really gonna be a stupid kid and hide it from me?”

She rocked back and forth on her heels, her glasses were missing, probably dropped them when she ran in here, so she couldn’t hide her face like she usually did.

After another long pause where Huntsman debated what sort of threat he could make to a six year old without her father finding out about it and finalizing those vivisection plans he was sure he had squirreled away somewhere but constantly denied, the brat relented and held out her hidden hand, and sure enough the sleeve was rolled up to the elbow and the outer side of her hand front he base of her pinky all the way down to her wrist was an angry red.

“Dumb kid.”

She whimpered again and a fresh set of tears began to bubble out of her eyes and he rolled his. “Sit down. I’m not risking your Aunt’s wrath by not patching you up after you did something stupid.” The kid quietly did as instructed and sat on the edge of the bathtub as he opened the medicine cabinet. The burn cream was far too high up for her to have been able to reach.

She had started to cry properly now… Stupid kids crying their eyes out over dumb things.

“Please don’t tell Daddy or Auntie.” she squeaked out when he finally crouched in front of her, holding out a hand for when her own was placed in his.

“Why? You scared of admitting you burned yourself trying to make your own dinner instead of being the rational and smart kid they both keep saying you are?”

The brat kept crying as he finished wrapping up the wound until the entire area was covered over her left hand.

“I can’t cause any problems…” That… gave him pause.

Sure kids want to be good. They might be little shits but they rarely WANT to be bad kids. So if she’d said that she ‘wanted to be a good girl’ or whatever that would have made sense. But… ‘cause problems’?

“What are you on about?”

“Daddy and Auntie have enough problems, and I can’t be one too!” she looked up at him then, sniffing pathetically and hair falling in her face at her vehemence “I gotta be no problems at all! Cuz Cuz… I’m a trooper! And clever, and a delight to have in class!”

….damn here he thought obsessive perfectionism wouldn’t kick in until teen years.

“You’re six years old is what you are.” UGH… he knew what adults were SUPPOSED to do around crying children.

Didn’t mean he had to like it.

Huntsman offered his hand to the kid again, and she didn’t hesitate before sliding her uninjured one into his. He tugged her forward, and she stumbled until her little body collided with his. And to keep her from escaping he placed his other hand on her back. “Who ever told you you ain’t allowed to be a damn kid, huh?”

“Nobody…”

“Kids don’t just pick up ‘delight to have in class’ from nowhere, I'm guessing it was a teacher?”

“No!”

“Then who's messing with the development of clan young? It’s been decades since this clan has had any young, and if our only child in thirty years has had her development messed with…” the kid let go of his hand and wrapped her arms around his neck.

“...Nobody has to… people are always sayin' stuff about how scary it is that me an’ Auntie are the only humans in our family… that you an’ Uncle Goliath eat people… That Daddy used to be handsome but now he’s just….i forget the word… The teachers wanna keep an eye on me, they keep saying that ‘demon behavior’ might rub off on me. And it’s stupid!” She pulled away to look at him again and she’d stopped crying, her face pinched in a pout. “It’s stupid cuz you an Uncle Goliath are super cool! And Daddy is Daddy! But they’re all scared and they shouldn’t be. But…” she looked away again and Huntsman took the opportunity to lift her into the air to steadily walk them back out into the living room. “But if I start bein’ a problem then they’re gonna think its your guys fault. It’s not, but they'll think it. And they're gonna do bad things cuz they’ll think they gotta and It’ll be my fault because I made problems and I can’t make problems!”

….huh….

“Maybe I should show those grownups how right they are about how dangerous I can be, if it upsets you that much.” The kid looked back up at him and he made sure to bear his fangs properly. She’d probably get scared too and he could remind her how he and Goliath were actually in fact quite dangerous, and while her father would never dream of hurting her, those ladies probably had the right idea, too.

And then the little shit laughed at him.

“You’re silly.” But just like that her mood was better. She leaned in and before he could tell her to buzz off or drop her she pressed a kiss to his cheek. “Thanks for bandaging me Uncle Huntsman. But I messed up the eggs still so I gotta make another dinner.”

“If you really don’t wanna cause problems-” he dropped her, she landed on the couch harmlessly. “-Just tell the grownup in the room that you’re getting hungry. Don’t just assume you know what you’re doing.”

She fingered the bandages on her hand again when she sat down properly in the seat. “Okay. Sorry Uncle Huntsman.”

“Just because you don’t want to cause problems doesn’t mean you have to do everything yourself. You’re literally a child.”

“Okay Uncle Huntsman.”

“Now out on one of your damn movies while I see if there’s anything edible left in this place.”

“Okay!”

More rebound than a beach ball apparently, that kid. Observant too, if she could connect probably idle chatter that… either teachers or parents of friends… would whisper about to not only her and hers, but also deduce the danger of her family being considered ‘scary’ and what she should do to combat it (whether it was a good idea or not)

He wondered how many of those scrapes she acted like she didn’t even notice were just her putting on a brave face because being seen as weak was suddenly something she thought she couldn’t afford to do.

… Minyi really was a tough kid, wasn’t she?

--

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