Well I have massive respect for Windii and anyone who can translate Japanese to us foreigners (even if I was a dick to one of them in the past, kinda sorry), but her stiff dialogue can be explained away by the fact she is not a natural English speaker, she's Russian. Even I struggle with it as I'm from Latín América in my own writing. Language barriers suck, man!
I mean, sure. I know it's a lot of hard work. I don't want to belittle the work Windii has put in on this stuff.
I'm mostly coming at this from the fact she has consistently hated me and I've never been sure why. All I can figure is that I complained about "accurate translations" versus localizations that play things more loose and she took it personally. But I genuinely don't know.
I shouldn't let it bother me. And 99% of my time, it doesn't. But when I do think about it, like when this topic is brought up, it makes me wonder, because as far as I'm aware, Windii and I have never interacted before. Whatever impression she's formed of me is not who I'm trying to be.
And sometimes that happens. You can do everything right and some people will still hate you for it. Eyepatch Wolf did a video about this a couple months ago that touches on some of it.
But, I dunno. If people are getting the wrong idea about me, I'd like to have a chance to clear the air. Maybe I'm being paranoid but every now and then I get the hint that there's a handful of people out there spreading lies about me. Like this interaction on my Youtube community post a few weeks ago:
I've had people impersonate me before. There was one specific incident where this kid pretended to be me for like four or five years, going around online bragging about the things I'd done. He hung around SFGHQ and other Sonic communities long enough that even once he gave up the ghost, he was considered a "valuable community member" and instead of being BlazeHedgehog he changed his name to Blazefire. Which was still the name of my personal website for like, 20 years.
But it means that there's a whole version of me out there that people think they know that was not me. And that weirds me out! I think it should weird me out! How many people out there saw a guy named "BlazeHedgehog" do something that wasn't me or anything I would say or do?
Which just exacerbates my worries that there are people out there who not only don't "get me", but are maybe basing that on a version of me that does not exist. It's super easy to get insecure about this!
And in terms of Windii, she obviously doesn't like me enough that she goes out of her way to block me on every platform we've ever shared; again, without us ever having interacted even once. What would I have ever said to make her that upset at me?
So ultimately it's like... I have to hold true to my values. I have to keep being myself. I have to stop worrying about it. But there are things I want to do with the work I put in, and I feel like I can't because of something I'm not even allowed to understand.
And for what it's worth, Windii's grasp of the English language seems fine in her blog posts. Nothing about the way she writes would indicate that English isn't her first language.
Did you know they apparently released Aka-Champion: Come On Baby on Steam last month??
Wow, I have no idea how that happened. They’re just calling it Come On Baby! now. It looks the same as the PS2 game, but they claim to have added some new modes.
So I get it, the "pivot to video" is here and video's easier to ingest than text. But doesn't it come off as a little desperate to embed an auto-playing video at the top of a news story even if nobody watches it? Isn't that just going to drive potential viewers AWAY? I know I specifically avoid sites that have auto-playing embedded video articles.
Auto-play video that is only barely related to the story below is pretty awful. Can’t wait for browsers to keep getting better at blocking that shit. I feel like the only valid use of auto-play might be “you clicked on a button that clearly indicated you were heading to a live stream, so here’s the video, already in progress.”
This is a stand in ask that I lost. It was about Sonic Frontiers. It was a four-part ask written kind of smugly about the open zone areas of Sonic Frontiers, and how all the random clutter (springs, dash panels, etc.) and high level of scripting/railroading doesn't fit in very well with open world design. They suggested Sega would have to go back to the drawing board and really change the design for whatever follows next.
So I wanted to redo this ask because I feel like I had a pretty good response.
I opened this ask jokingly calling the anon out for sounding a little snooty, because it used some big words. But my main opener was: Haven't you played Super Mario Odyssey? Each level in Super Mario Odyssey is effectively its own little open world, particularly something like Tostarena.
it's this huge area dotted with a town, ruins, and other landmarks, with big stretches of empty space between them. The landmarks are where the traditional gameplay is -- platforming challenges, enemies, puzzles, and so on, and you have to traverse across the desert to reach them.
I also think about Jak & Daxter, maybe one of the first open world platformers ever, and how it has kind of a hub-and-spoke system. Generally you are working out of a base, like a workshop or a village or something, with roads that lead out of, around, and back into that base area (or to other buildings that act sort of like self-contained dungeons).
Each "road" takes the place of a level. Now, there's nothing keeping you on the road, which is part of the fun, since you can cross between roads, go around obstacles, and so on. But roads are definitely setup to guide you through a space like a level would.
And as someone who plays a lot of it, I think in the context of Fortnite, which is this huge island covered in a spiderweb of roads and pathways leading to, from, and around POIs (Points of Interest).
It's a system that drives all good open world design, and was kind pioneered in Disneyland all the way back in the 1950's. Disney didn't call them "points of interest", he called them "weenies" -- big iconic areas that you can see from long distances that are interesting enough to make you want to explore them, while also helping you stay oriented in the overall space.
So take this screenshot of the current Fortnite map:
My car is parked at a crossroads. Directly ahead of me and a little to the left is a shack where Gwenpool is roaming around. Further in the distance is the POI of "Reckless Railways", which houses the map's Grand Central Station, where the train rolls through and restocks its supplies. Further beyond that are the snowy mountains and the massive Grand Glacier hotel. To the far left, on the edge of the image, is the forge at Dr. Doom's castle.
Roads are meant for traveling quickly down. They lead you to points of interest, where you slow down and comb through an area carefully. And, obviously, there's all kinds of little landmarks dotted all over the place between major POIs, encouraging you to get off the road and go exploring. Gas stations and ruins and little shacks and stuff.
It's extremely easy to adapt these concepts to a Sonic game, which is what's so baffling about Sonic Frontiers being such an incoherent mess.
Roads should be your boost Sonic zones. It can't be a random collection of junk, it can't be something you unlock as a means of "fast travel." There has to be an identifiable road, a series of pathways leading you around the island. You put grind rails and boost pads and dash rings along this road. This is where players are supposed to go fast. Roads = travel.
These roads will lead you to points of interest and other landmarks. A POI, like in Super Mario Odyssey, is where puzzles, platforming, and exploration are mostly done. I do not mean "four stone buildings" like in Sonic Frontiers. I mean a place that feels like a place. A location that feels like it has character. Personality. Something you work your way through, absorb, and conquer. Again, like Odyssey.
And then you stash little secrets and landmarks off the beaten path for players who want to go offroading.
2-3 islands per game, 2-3 biomes per island. You can have specific race or time trial missions to and from different landmarks, you can have POI exploration missions, you can have missions to change the state of these POIs like blowing up power plants or unlocking gates. Maybe Eggman has a giant pipe he's using to pump toxic chemicals into the water, so you have to turn off the pump and then you get to run down the inside of the empty pipe like an F-Zero GX track.
It's easy to design this game. You don't even need cyberspace levels. Heck, remember GTA5? Most missions had bronze, silver, and gold medals. You can still have a ranking system in an open world game.
Look, I even drew art of this concept, what, four years ago? five?
Somebody should pay me a livable wage for this kind of stuff
What was the neurology appointment like? (I am asking this to myself because someone in my discord asked this and I gave a big response that should live on this blog)
It was a tiny little office building, shared the floor with both a law firm and I think some kind of spa or something. Lots of bare feet people walking around at times.
I met with my doc and he handed me off to his assistant and she ran me through all my tests. Every few tests she'd give me an option to take a break and I never felt like I needed one. There were many different test types but half the tests were basically multiple choice questionnaires. Usually 100-150 questions each, five or six rounds across the day. They spread them out.
The multi-choice stuff was probing my feelings at the moment, the way I felt as a child, whether I saw hallucinations or heard voices, how paranoid I was about people secretly plotting against me, whether I engaged in self harm, whether I had ever had any kind of suicidal thoughts, how well I thought I could stay on task, how intelligent I thought I was, how well I thought my memory was, whether I felt like I had the capability to feed and dress myself, or set my own appointments, etc. It was in the ballpark of 600-800 total questions.
The rest of the tests were a lot more interesting. We did word association, where the assistant would give me a word and asked me to describe words that were like it, or words that were opposite of it. Or she'd give me a word and ask me to describe what it meant to me.
I would be shown a page full of shapes arranged in a specific pattern, four or five images, with one blank slot, and I'd be asked to pick from a list for what goes in the blank slot. Or I'd be shown a similar page full of patterns with a number corresponding to each pattern, but one of the patterns would be missing its number, and I'd have to figure out how the number related to the patterns and solve for the missing number.
At one point she pulled out a tray of 9 blocks, and each side was painted either all white, half red, or solid red. Like this:
She gave me four blocks and showed me a booklet full of patterns. I had to use the blocks to match the pattern on the page. After I did ten of those she gave me the rest of the blocks (so I had all 9) and showed me a second booklet full of significantly more complex patterns and asked me to match those.
So I'd have to replicate a pattern like this, but the booklet didn't show me the block edges.
She would lay out a bunch of transparent discs and squares and give me directions on where to move which shapes and how, like "Move the red circle below the blue square" or "Make the green square touch the yellow square" or "put the blue circle to the right of the yellow square."
She brought out this whole tray, almost like a board game. It was all these little squares and each square had a slot in it, kind of shaped like a keyhole.
But every slot was oriented at a different angle. Some were horizontal, some were diagonal, or upside down, etc. Included with the keyhole board was a tray of pins where the tips were shaped exactly like the holes. I had to put all the pins in the holes at the correct angle as fast as I could. Like playing Operation backwards, or Perfection without the buzzer. Actually, I should note a lot of these were timed. It wasn't just "do it", it was "do it as fast as you can."
I had to do the key hole pin thing three times.
One game was on a laptop where it would flash different letters of the alphabet on screen at random intervals. Every time I saw a letter, I was instructed to click the mouse button… EXCEPT if it showed the letter X. If I saw the letter X, I was told to never click the button and just let the letter pass. I did that for, easily, 100+ letters.
Another game on the laptop was them showing me a group of four images. Every time it'd show me a group of images, they'd be in a different location on the screen. I was told to memorize one image out of the group. I was shown maybe ten groups and then they'd repeat all the groups again, but change the order of the images, the location they appeared on screen, and they'd take away images, all the while asking me to pick out which one I was asked to memorize.
Then we played Simon. She'd tell me a number, and ask me to repeat it back to her. Then three numbers. Five numbers. Eight numbers. Ten numbers.
Once we got up to ten numbers, she started back over, but now I had to tell her the numbers in reverse order. So if she'd say 1, 5, 21, 84, 63, 9, I'd have to repeat it as 9, 63, 84, 21, 5, 1. No paper, just off the top of your head.
Once we got up to ten of those, she now gave me a list of numbers and asked me to repeat them back to her but sorted smallest to largest. So in the above example that would be, 1, 5, 9, 21, 63, 84.
She brought out… you know telegraph machines? It's like this little lever thingy you tap with your index finger. Like this:
She brought one out, solid aluminum, and the lever was attached to an analog roller counter. I had to lay my hand flat and tap as fast as I could in 30 seconds using my index finger only. They were adamant it had to be my finger, not my wrist or elbow or anything else. Every time I'd tap, it would increment the roller counter. I had to do it five or six times with my right hand and three or four times with my left. All that was before we took a one hour break for lunch.
After lunch, she brought out this booklet and flipped to a random page and asked me to draw the pattern. To the best of my memory the pattern was something like this:
After I drew it once she moved on to a different test. She gave me a list of twelve words and I had to recite as many of them back to her as I could remember. There might have also been a short story attached to it to set up the words, I forget. The words were, like, campfire, village, school, bell, coffee, firetruck, lighthouse, seagull, stuff like that. She'd read them out, I'd repeat as many as I could, she'd read them again, I'd repeat as many as I could, and then she read them a third time and I'd repeat as many as I could.
Once we did that she gave me a blank sheet of paper and asked me to draw the pattern again, but this time purely from memory.
Back to the words. She gave a new setup and read a list of twelve totally different words to me… and then asked me to repeat as many of the ORIGINAL twelve words as I could remember. And again, we did that two or three times, me repeating the original twelve and her trying to throw me off.
Then she had me draw the pattern from memory again. And then it was back to words. Now she gave me a sheet with 48 words on it and asked me to circle as many of the original 12 as I could remember.
Then we switched over where she would recite a passage from a book and ask me to repeat it back to her out loud. The passages got increasingly long until I was basically repeating entire paragraphs back to her.
Then she gave me a pair of headphones. I was told to listen for a voice in either my left or right ear. I had to signal which ear I heard the voice and then repeat the word it said. Once I did fifteen rounds of that, it switched up
Two voices would say a different word simultaneously in both ears. So I'd hear "Dog" in my left ear and at the exact time hear "Apple" in my right. I had to repeat both words to the best of my ability. Did fifteen rounds of that.
Now, 30 minutes after the last time I'd done it, she handed me a blank sheet of paper and asked me to draw the pattern again. She then gave me a booklet full of shapes and asked me to circle which shapes were in the pattern I'd been repeatedly drawing.
As we were winding down for the afternoon she gave me one of the hardest tests in all the appointment. She opened up a THICK book. Really really thick. The page she showed me had 24 boxes on it. Each box was one of three colors: Red, Green or Blue. I had to go through the entire page saying the color of each box out loud until the page was done.
She turned the page. The 24 color boxes were now replaced with 24 words, either saying Red, Green, or Blue. I had to read all the words out to her in order.
Next page. 24 words, but now the words are in color. And the color of the word never matches what the word itself is saying. So the word "red" might be printed in green, "blue" might be printed in red, and so on. I had to go through each word and tell her what the color of each word was, not what the word itself said. So the word "blue" printed in red text, I had to say red.
Next page. 24 words again, in color, the colors do not match the words, but now some of the words are inside a box and some aren't. If the word is inside the box, I read the word. If the word is outside the box, I say the color it's printed in.
One of the last things she had me do (that wasn't another questionnaire) was she then read 30 words to me and asked me one last time to tell her as many of the original 12 words I could remember.
I touched base with the doc again before I left and it took a couple weeks to get the results. He told them to me over a Zoom call and gave me a full 28 page report on Monday.
Alas, it had to happen sooner or later, but I have retired the old Internet-o-matic and replaced it with this. The Internet-o-matic was a great idea when Youtube used to give you a huge space for your channel's promo video to rest, but times have changed and so has Youtube.
This video will also be doubling as my "Fan Finder" advertisement, whatever that is.
It's a little cheesy, but I think it more or less hits all of the notes I wanted to. Though it's slightly dishonest - instead of ripping the original video files for some of the clips in this, I actually re-recorded them. It should be doubly obvious if you watch in 720p60.
