BloodyFrickenHell

I can either go the route of sanity, or go the route of lampshading everything I say or do for eternity so I always feel justified and secure.

[kiddemundo]

I'm sure this behavior has been observed before, but one of my favorite things about Far Far West is the fact that the Marauders are programmed to kill Any cryptic...including this game's version of lootbugs, meaning that I'll often stumble across random fragments and free gold just lying around.

[kiddemundo]

Started watching hermitcraft season 11 from Joel Smallishbean's perspective, and I have been getting advertisements for a 'horse game' about being a horse girl raising and caring for horses. Youtube, I'm...I'm not sure you quite understand Joel's relationship to horses.

[kiddemundo]

Playing Far Far West and realizing that my true calling is not the constant-output sustained fire peashooters I normally like running in the few multiplayer shooter games I play but the big, unwieldy, one-shoting sniper-rifles, and the only reason I don't play them is that having a skilled human opponent basically forces snipers into a boring, passive playstyle.

[kiddemundo]

I have an unfortunate tendency to associate something I'm reading with a song I'm playing frequently at that time. This sometimes works with the story, and sometimes against it, more often the latter than the former. For instance, I now associate the gritty, bloody Witcher Saga with the song Luigi's Mansion: Library Piano

[kiddemundo]

In basically all respects I feel like Totk's story, aesthetics and worldbuilding was inferior to Botw, even if I think Totk's gameplay is an improvement. With one notable exception, and that being the moment you arrive in one of the main four towns.

Why?

Because it hits so, so much harder in Totk than in Botw, in a way that kinda required Botw to exist to work. Like in Botw I'm just saving a bunch of people from some abstract evil, right? Like, there's this whole melancholy, but as a player I'm more suffusing the vibes from the world, not getting emotionally gut-punched. The towns become just another place to save/explore.

In Totk, you've already played Botw. You know every settlement you fly to, you know the people, their personalities and aspirations and you're familiar with the place. It's no longer some random town, it's your town, with your friends.

And now the threat is real. Because it's happening not to some abstract kingdom, but to your kingdom.

You care about these people now, and so you care about what Ganondorf did to them. And it makes his villainy so much more effective than in Botw. Because you're not thinking "Here I go a-saving again," you're thinking "Oh, honey, what has he done to you?"

[kiddemundo]

I feel like all Links can be put on a triangle with 'Gremlin,' 'Sweetheart,' and 'Ronin' as the vertices. Drawing from the games I have played, Hero of Time pulls furthest 'Ronin,' Hero of the Sky pulls furthest 'Sweetheart,' and Hero of the Wild pulls furthest 'Gremlin.' The only weird one out of these three is Wild, where his cutscene characterization puts him a bit more centrist, erring Ronin, but his actual gameplay basically forces you to play him as a Gremlin.

[kiddemundo]

I remember picking up D&D 5e when I was young(er) and going "At Last! The Archetypical Fantasy Book." I then remember reading through the monster manual and going "Wow, for an Archetypical Fantasy Book this game sure has some weird shit in it."

Case in point: Clerics. Why is the class that is supposed to be a passive support character have one of the highest ACs, decent combat weapons, powerful offensive spells, and, in base 5e, so many viable subclasses that you can spec them into basically any party role that exists? Like, you'd think the Cleric would be the waifish healer and 'random (holy) bullshit go!' character that falls over at a slight breeze and the Paladin be the horrifying unkillable living tank, but, nope, the Cleric's also a living tank. Just, like, slightly better.

Like, I know 5e is unwieldy levels of massive and has a design philosophy that often times actively hurts it, but, like, Wotc has playtesters, right? At some point someone should have been, like, "Why is the ranger barely playable but the cleric (of all things) is so unreasonably versatile and powerful given their respective flavortexts?"

[kiddemundo]

Realizing that the "Who I am is where I stand" speech is, like, the perfect antidote/canon reset to the major issues with the Timeless Child arc, namely the "destinies specialist person" problem. The fact that the Doctor explicitly defines who they are themselves is such a useful concept.

[kiddemundo]

Sometimes, the boss feels too difficult. It's patterns are too quick, and while you can feel that they are technically within your grasp, the windows feel too tight. You feel like it's all dodge, no punish.

And then, you remember.

You have a light attack.

[kiddemundo]

"Do you mean to say a devil wrote an editorial on these eggs?"

"Yes. We'd like you to perform an exorcism on the head editor of the Townsville gazette, thank you very much."

[kiddemundo]

Why do my characters have to grow and change throughout the narrative? Why can't I just make all my protagonists hypercompetent paragons who never get over their gaping character flaws and be done with it?

[kiddemundo]

The fact that we have onomatopoeias like "mrt" prove that, even setting aside the many non-english languages that do this, the only reason english isn't filled with words with three uninterrupted unique consonants is that we're cowards.

[kiddemundo]

I remember playing Prodigy as a kid (along with whatever "I guaranty this'll be fun" video game adjacent math exercise my teacher/parent wanted me to do), and knowing what I know now about game design (the most rudimentary principles), I'm starting to see a massive gaping problem in that a lot of the educational games I played, especially about math, were like, embarassed they had to include math?

I mean, I know these games are not made by, like, the worlds best game designers or anything, I know they're low effort, but it was always like "Math is fun! Why is math fun? Uhhhbuhuhuh Dinosaurs. With laser guns." Like, no, Dinosaurs with Laser Guns are fun. That's not related to math. You have to prove MATH is fun, it's self evident that Dinosaurs with Laser Guns are fun.

Taking a look at Prodigy specifically, it's base form was as a monster-taming rpg. How was math integrated? Well, whenever you tried to do something, the game yoinked you into a stylistically different (bland) interface and forced you to do multiplication, blooket style. Except blooket is doing this as a review tool, the game is just a way to force you to do review, whereas Prodigy was pitched to me as a seven year-old as a way to make math fun.

NOOOoooo. That's not how you do that. Just because I'm seven doesn't mean I can't intuit when someone's trying to pull correlation-without-causation, especially because I'd seen the proverbial Dinosaurs with Laser Guns shtick without the Math dragging it down and it was so much cooler.

At the bare minimum, math interfaces in these games should be crunchier. Like, imagine if your calculator, instead of just handing you the number, briefly flashed through the entire calculation process with a mechanical ticking sound and then used typewriter spines to click out the answer. What if, for each place value you got correct with your answer, the number locked itself in steel with a "csmash" sound? Hell, what if their were little animations for calculating operations, where the operand sign did a little flip and then smushed the numbers together with a little "Brrding!" And that's without designing the problems themselves to be satisfying or interesting, or finding ways to integrate the core math operation micro into a macro game structure like some insane math roguelike or math strategy game, or even without overhauling the UI architecture to make the system more usable. Like, typing games do this better by a significant margin, learn from the typing games! Why am I making this post? Well, when 7 year old me was beginning to get bored of the "Dinosaur Laser Gun" shtick and starting to see the intrusive math architecture underlying it all, I asked, "Why don't I like this?" and concluded that educational games were just bad. Now that I'm older, I know math can be fun in the right circumstances, and now I know that educational games are bad - but they don't have to be! There's a situation vacant!

[kiddemundo]

Tadc episode 9 spoilers under the cut

They're playing a ttrpg they're playing a ttrpg they're playing a ttrpg they're playing a ttrpg they're playing a ttrpg they're playing a ttrpg thEY'RE-

[kiddemundo]

Having watched the last tadc episode

"Ah ha ha ha ha! I am spoilerproof!"

[kiddemundo]

If the chip isn't an 8th the size of the actual console then what's the point of buying a game physically?

[kiddemundo]

I just got jumpscared by the Steam Next Fest. Luckily nobody was there to hear my shocked little yelp.