sheepfilms
No title available
@theartofmadeline
Game Changer & Make Some Noise
roma★
Lint Roller? I Barely Know Her
Xuebing Du
Monterey Bay Aquarium
tannertan36
Mike Driver
art blog(derogatory)
if i look back, i am lost
No title available
Cosimo Galluzzi
untitled
Sade Olutola
titsay
Jar Jar Binks Fan Club
🩵 avery cochrane 🩵
Game of Thrones Daily
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@bubbludology
Enter the Wyrm, my roguelike with 50+ unique platforming abilities (and counting!) is in open alpha! You can play early development builds for free right now! Explore a giant worm and learn a unique moveset every run!
New builds are uploaded in the Wyrm Discord, where you can discuss the game and give feedback! (Alternatively, just click here for the Itch page!)
I've been working on Wyrm since mid 2021. If you'd like to support the game's continued development, I have a ko-fi!
One thing about me is I will occasionally get really into a text based RPG
Since people seemed to love my 2025 list and definitely didn't complain and nitpick about it, here's another one. Go nuts, Feel free to share what games you've played and remember this is games RELEASED in 2016.
A compiled list of video games released in 2016, your choices will decide on what are truly Tumblr's Favourites of 2016
How many have you played?
1-20
21-50
51-100
101-200
201-280
None/I'm Bald/Video games? In this Economy?
Things only exist if you can see them in indie Sci-Fi puzzle adventure, Object Impermanence. So does this post only exist if you see it too?
The Steam page may also only exist if you see it:
A first person puzzle game where your vision defines reality, and only the things you can see exist. Learn and master the strange behaviours
taking my gamer dog out for a walkthrough
How do you think fail states, specifically dying and reloading a save, affect the narrative of a video game? Because in a lot of games they feel like a pretty detrimental compromise to me, it always feels like I'm not actually supposed to use that mechanic. I haven't really found a way yet to interpret a lot of them in a way that doesn't just make the game worse.
hmm i mean
like, i think there's a lot of ways a ''fail state'' can inform a game's narrative, right? like...
there's the way you're talking about here, right, where the fail state is something you're not 'supposed' to experience, it exists as a structuring element guiding you away from or towards certain actions, right? like... in subnautica, it's pretty rare to actually die. and it can be a frustrating and unfun experience when you do and you were carrying a bunch of stuff and you're like oh great gotta farm all that shit up. but the threat of dying is really really important to building the game's tension, putting some actual real-world weight (even if it's just in terms of threatening a purely digital object that represents a time commitment) into the idea of a reaper leviathan eating you. if there was no 'consequence' for getting Gotten by the Scary Getter, it would suck a lot of tension out of trying to avoid them, right?
this is a recurring thing in horror game design, right, if you make the chase sections too hard they stop being scary because knowing that all that happens is a scary cutscene + the impact of it being diminished by seeing it over and over again turns the Scary Getter into a nuisance that you groan at rather than something scary. so i think there can be a lot of value to parts of a game that you're not really ''supposed'' to experience but that need to exist to structure how you experience the parts you are...
& then of course i think there's a lot of games where you are meant to experience the failure states and they teach you important things about the world and characters. like recently i've been trying out this underrated indie gem called dark souls, you've never heard of it, and within an hour of playing i'd died like five times. and each time the death taught me something iomportawnt about the game: dying to the asylum demon taught me that you don't always have to fight enemies the first time you see them. dying in the middle of a skeleton clusterfuck taught me that you should try to fight enemies 1 on 1 as much as possible. dying when that cunt pushed a boulder onto me taught me to look the fuck out for traps. these fail states are essentially a form of tutorializing, and also help tell the story of dark souls, that you're an insignificant little fuck in a bleak and crushing world.
or, like, take disco elysium -- i think a lot of people who've never played it know you can get a game over screen because you sat in an uncomfortable chair. and yea if your last save was an hour ago i get why that's frustrating. but not only does the whole evrart sequence also serve the tutorializing function that my dark souls deaths did (demonstrating that you should unlearn the traditional CRPG correlation between 'danger' and combat) but it and other potential game overs like it tell you so much about harry du bois: that this is someone whose mind and body ahve been pushed so close to the edge that it's feasible for him to have a fatal heart attack trying to get his tie off the ceiling fan or have a complete mental breakdown because a child called him a faggot or just straight up shoot himself in the head trying to win an argument.
and ofc the fact that people who've never played the game have heard of the chair death speaks to another thing about failure states, which is that they can be fun and memorable. there's a reason why ykow some people demonstarte nostalgia for the king's quest death messages
& then of course there's the ways that 'bad endings' can inform you about the reality of the world of the 'real ending'. crpg ending slides that show you sme horrible fate for the companion that you didn't complete the quest for provide information and context for the quest itself and how it helps them grow and change. & then there's the most literal possible execution of this, zero escape, where due to all kinds of temporal bullshit the events of the 'bad endings' directly causally influence the events of the 'true ending'.
finally, of course, there's games where what would be a 'fail state' elsewhere is just part of a diegetic narrative. pyre is my absolute favorite example of this. if you lose a game of prison basketball then you just lose, and the other guys win, and when the stakes are escaping to the surface that means an npc leaves and you and your friends stay underground. on two occasions, this led me to deliberately throwing matches because i felt the NPCs on the other side deserved the win more than my guys. hades, as much as i hate it for a bunch of other reasons, did pull a really cool maneuver in making the constant death and grinding repitition in-universe features of zagreus' experience and the game's themes. katana zero also goes cool places with this, taking the route of "every failed attempt is the protagonist's precognitive abilities showing him a future where he dies" and exploring what that means for him emotionally and psychologically.
so, yknow! i think there is a huge amount of super worthwhile space for failure states, whether it's by teaching you about the game's world and characters, or helping create a specific experience by pushing you to avoid them, or by simply integrating them directly into the narrative and interrogating them... i think they're pretty neat and a storytelling tool that's unique to games :)
Next retro RPG I should play
Secret of Mana (1993)
Final Fantasy VI (1994)
EarthBound (1994)
Chrono Trigger (1995)
when your phone autocorrects “final fantasy” to “finland fantasy”
*Explaining how public transit works to a speedrunner*
So imagine a frame rule
really mean minecraft mod idea: rituals that work but in a very vague and hard to understand ways
at the start of a world, a set of actions are randomly chosen which have some positive effect. walking counterclockwise around a tree or throwing an item into a fire or killing an animal with an axe. there has to be a very large number of possible actions such that they won't seem to repeat.
when doing a ritual, you get a buff that's clearly there but kind of subtle. maybe ores drop more, or monsters don't hurt as much. it's never communicated that you have a buff, the idea is that you accidentally do a ritual and notice "oh shit I'm getting really lucky, maybe I should do that more"
there's also a set of attributes which can greatly increase the effectiveness of your rituals, completely randomized per world of course. sometimes it's additional steps, drawn from the same set as before. sometimes it's decorating the ritual site in a particular way, with skulls or candles or flowers. maybe it's more effective at a certain time of day or phase of the moon. maybe it's more effective on the top of a mountain or in a cave.
because the magnitude and duration of the buff is randomized, you can't really know if stuff you're doing is helping, but you'll be always trying shit out and modifying your rituals. the buffs get really impactful, and you can hardly play the game without them.
after a while you'll build up elaborate rituals and intricate temples housing them, and importantly
half the shit you're doing does absolutely nothing
if you get lucky a few times with a modification to the ritual you'll adopt it even if it actually does nothing. depending on how succeptible to confirmation bias you are, you might develop whole rituals that literally do nothing but you're entirely convinced that they do. you'll be dancing around trees and putting pumpkins on your head for literally no measurable benefit.
will this be actually fun? probably not. will I actually make this? absolutely not. i just think it would be an interesting case study in behavior. if someone wants to steal my idea, please do and tell me so I can play it.
Opus Magnum DLC this month!!
getting increasingly confused trying to have sex with my point and click wife but she just keeps saying “you cant use that here”
i have the ancient sarcophagus and the cuckoo clock. what the fuck else do i need man
While it is generally agreed that the folkloric figures of "Link" and "Princess Zelda" are based on real historical individuals, neither those individuals nor their respective myth-cycles were contemporary, being separated in time by nearly two hundred years, with each initially being the protagonist of their own body of tales.
When the two myth-cycles were fused by later chroniclers to produce the combined Link-Zelda cycle which is familiar to audiences today, the figure of Link assumed the role of overall protagonist. Securing Zelda's freedom from captivity is often inserted as a secondary objective into episodes which were originally Link tales, while Link typically subsumes most or all of Zelda's role in episodes which were originally Zelda tales.
In many cases, the Link-Zelda version is the only iteration of a given episode which survives, so determining which tales were originally part of which precursor cycle is not without controversy; however, the repetitive nature of the perils which preclude Zelda's active participation in many episodes – kidnapped, possessed, sealed in enchanted crystal, etc. – may offer some clues.
(The Gamelon saga represents the the largest known body of Zelda tales which are believed to have persisted in more or less their original form. Linguistic analysis suggests that the episode in which Link is revealed to have been trapped in a heretofore-unmentioned magic mirror the entire time is a clumsy interpolation by a later author, inserted to justify the saga's inclusion in the broader Link-Zelda cycle.)
The very first Legend of Zelda was itself a Zelda legend, hence its title. It was also one of the first to be adapted to the contemporary Link-Zelda structure of the myths. The introduction of Link into this myth was shoddy and introduced a number of inconsistencies.
For example, it's said that Link is a wanderer from afar who rescues Impa from Moblins but when he arrives in Hyrule, he has to take the place of the unarmed and inexperienced Princess Zelda. And so this allegedly experienced warrior who just killed a bunch of Moblins arrives in Hyrule without so much as a sword in hand.
Similarly, the original myth featured Zelda assembling the Triforce of Wisdom, the only force that could stand against the Triforce of Power in Ganon's possession. Because it was the first to be adapted, there were concerns about disempowering Zelda by replacing her entirely with Link. As a result, a strange compromise was struck; One in which Zelda, after assembling the Triforce, then immediately broke it back down into its component pieces and re-hid them for Link to find.
By contrast, The Adventure of Link, true to its name, is the first Link legend. The importing of Zelda into it as the sleeping princess that Link awakens from her long slumber proved to be just as clunky as the importing of Link into The Legend of Zelda. Most notably, the confusing questions raised as to whether Zelda is meant to be the princess Link rescued in his previous adventure or the one he is rescuing in this new one.
Similarly, Zelda's nemesis Ganon is roped into Adventure of Link very awkwardly. Link's nemesis is his own dark shadow, with only a scant few mentions of the idea that Link's defeat will somehow result in Ganon returning... just because.
But the largest and most consequential of adaptations made to The Adventure of Link is the revising of the magic scepter Link uses to awaken the Sleeping Princess into the Triforce of Courage, a modern invention meant to tie Link more closely to Zelda and Ganon's mythos.
And this is where the study of the legends' history becomes rocky, as many scholars consider the very notion that the Triforce of Courage did not exist in the original tales to be downright apocryphal.
We also can see the shoehorning of Zelda into Link's Oracle Saga, where instead of having 2 unrelated adventures, Ganon's minions form a superficial bridge between the two stories to introduce peril to Zelda - Zelda's presence or lack thereof has no significant impact on either story
And there are some distinct quirks to the Gamelon cycle that argue for the presence of syncretic merging of the Zelda in the tales we know with a similar legend from another culture. As does the difference between the Triforce of Wisdom, her sometimes status as a Sage, and the Sacred Power/Light Force/etc power that has different names in different legends.
But it's an interesting pairing of a Celestial legend (Zelda) with a Cthonic one (Link) - after all, how many of the stories that clearly are originally Link tales involve another world? I submit as evidence the presence of stories such as Link to the Past and Majora's Mask; even in the Era of Twlight cycle, we see a previous version of Link resurrected as a shade.
On the flip side, the Era of the Sky gives us Zelda as explicitly, canonically a reincarnation of the Goddess Hylia; whether this was part of the original mythos, or an evolution of why she has the Sacred Power of light in her bloodline is unclear to me. But Skyward Sword was clearly, originally, a Zelda story - after all, Link spends the entire tale chasing after Zelda.
Skyward Sword cannot possibly have been a Zelda tale, because it clearly follows the ur-pattern of the Legend of Link, wherein Link meets three challenges (usually associated with the colors green, red, and blue) and is rewarded with his principal sword, with which he is then able to meet some number of additional challenges before defeating his foe.* However, it is highly likely that in the original iteration, it was Hylia and not Zelda whom Link sought. Skyward Sword has many hallmarks of being a later expression of the Link cycle, including themes of enlightenment and spiritual transcendence that are very different from the simple physical violence of the earlier expressions. Link's quest for Hylia is a quest for the essence of divinity itself.
Current research seems to indicate that the oldest extant version of the Link tale is the one labeled Wind Waker, which clearly dates to the Hylians' Seafaring/Exploration period, before they settled in the land which they named Hyrule (the legend-within-a-legend wherein Hyrule is sunk under the sea can be attributed to a later admixture of elements from other versions of the Link cycle, or other mythologies entirely). There is of course a Zelda figure in Wind Waker, but for the first half of the tale she is identified as Tetra, a very different character indeed! There is speculation that most of the "Zeldas" in confirmed Link stories were actually Tetra, his original female companion, before she was overwritten as Zelda when the two mythologies were merged.
* Linguistic scholars believe "Ganon" to derive from the Hylian root dialect word gann, which simply translates as "enemy" or "opposition." There is no reason to suppose that every instance of "Ganon" or "Ganondorf" in the tales refers to the same entity!
While identifying Tetra with Zelda is of course the product of later revision, the revelation that Tetra is herself a princess may not be.
As previously noted, descent into a mystical Underworld – often, but not always, explicitly identified with the realm of the dead – is a common element of Link tales. This descent is frequently paired with an encounter and subsequent rivalry or alliance (often one, then the other) with that realm's queen. In particular, the motif of Link forming an early alliance with a mysterious young woman who later proves to be the Underworld realm's queen-in-exile is not found only here; consider, for example, the (admittedly divisive) Twilight saga. Indeed, if we accept the identification of the Skyward saga's desolate surface realm with such an Underworld, the revelation of Link's childhood sweetheart as a mortal incarnation of the goddess Hylia arguably fits this mould!
(Of course, as the earliest versions of the Wind Waker saga are presently lost, any conclusions regarding exactly how this trope was introduced to the tale are unavoidably speculative. In the absence of further discoveries, whether Tetra was originally simply a young pirate lord who acquired her Underworld-queen attributes in the process of being fused with Zelda, or whether she was already queen-in-exile of a very different Underworld which was later replaced with a fallen Hyrule to justify her identification with Zelda must remain an open question.)
Ganondorf is consistently depicted with Gerudo features, even when the Gerudo are otherwise featured as allies to Link and/or Zelda. "Ganondorf" likely arose from early Hylian words for the Gerudo, rendered roughly as geldarm or geldman, fused with the aforementioned gann; a plausible intermediate being "ganngeldar".
The Ganondorf figure likely incorporates a number of Gerudo leaders from early Hylian-Gerudo conflicts, who may have been the original antagonists of the Link tales before being fused into the Zelda mythos. The specific epithet Dragmire is recorded as a title claimed by the Gerudo warlord Ludfo after a series of victories against Hylian forces during the Ridgelands War.
While Ganondorf typically transforms wholly into Ganon for a final confrontation, this is likely a latter addition to incorporate the Ganon figure as an abstract "enemy". In earlier tellings, Ganondorf's role likely ended with his defeat and either imprisonment or exile.
Older stories in the cycle cast the Gerudo as monolithic enemies or even inhuman, as the geldarm of A Link to the Past; the emergence of a singular Ganondorf figure is also accompanied by more sympathetic (or at least more human) Gerudo. It's likely a number of these Ganondorf stories were coopted by the Naboorid dynasty after the Gerudo unification to legitimise their rule versus a perceived past wickedness.
What if I play the new Terraria update all day
crab uber
!!!!!
