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Lamp, broken circa 1988

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  1. usually i upload reviews straight up over here in the format I've been doing, but I've played enough games from this year that I have opinions on that I'm gonna go out of order and then cannibalize them over there. And to start, reverse cannibalism! PENNY'S BIG BREAKAWAY [3] These sick fucks. All the trailers for this game were about how it's the Sonic Mania team and how it's this big fun platform adventure that's a throwback to like what if the sega saturn had more going on. They didn't tell anyone they made Gimmick 3D! Who the fuck would be cruel enough to sell Gimmick 3D to kids?! TEKKEN 8 [2] Gift of the Magi'd myself. Got this game to support a friend going through a tough time only to learn they thought I bought it for myself, and the tough time might prevent them from being able to play this. My fault! There have never been two good Tekkens in a row, and, well, behold. I'm definitely not just bitter because I became a Ganryu main at the end of Tekken 7 and will almost 100% never get to play my beautiful boy again. PIZZA TOWER: THE NOISE UPDATE [4] Last year, my personal GOTY was tied between Void Stranger and Pizza Tower. I eventually decided to get behind Void Stranger because it was more important to me to tell people to play it and how fuckin impossible great it is. Pure mechanics though? Pizza Tower in a walk. This year, Pizza Tower is threatening to do it a-fucking-gain with a free update that adds a new playable character that plays so differently that all these stages look and act differently now. They also added a secret third mode that I think could possibly get someone killed! What a great game! UNICORN OVERLORD [4] Decided to go outside of my comfort zone and hit the jackpot. Time devouring tactics, which I'm fortunate enough to be able to use while on an exercise bike. It also has a story, I hear. POCKET CARD JOCKEY: RIDE ON! [4] In my review of the original, I wrote this: "One day they'll put that iOS one on the Switch and I'll scream to death, come back to life, and play the shit out of it, much like my homie the Pocket Card Jockey does." They did. I did. It's a port of a perfect game on a system more people have. Go fuckin play it.
  2. I can't get the screenshot I took to embed for whatever reason, so here's a transcript on the most auspicious appearance of Corporate Officer No. 1. On page 48, Paragraph 242 states the following: "For instance, in or around March 2021, Ms. Grant introduced herself to WWE Corporate Officer No. 1 when they passed one another in the hallway. WWE Corporate Officer No. 1 responded by telling Ms. Grant that WWE Corporate Officer No. 1 knew exactly who she was." So that's not good.
  3. sure! Top 10 Games I played this year Void Stranger Pizza Tower Street Fighter 6 Armored Core VI: Fires of Rubicon Moonring Alan Wake II My House Super Mario Bros Wonder Cocoon Chants of Sennaar Other games I liked this year Retro Bowl College F-Zero 99 My Friendly Neighborhood YEAH YOU WANT THOSE GAMES RIGHT? SO HERE YOU GO! NOW LETS SEE YOU CLEAR THEM! Terra Nil Battlebit Remastered before they fucked it up A bunch of stuff through the Netflix Games program the Fortnite Racing Game Age of Empires 4 on Xbox Metroid Prime Remastered Pocket City 2 Quake 2 Rerelease Old games I played this year Landstalker Paper Mario Grindstone Final Fantasy XII SO MUCH TETRIS Castlevania Legends Anodyne DNF Duel Games I didn't like, old or new Battlebit Remastered after they fucked it up Redfall Trepang2 Hi-Fi Rush Fuga: Melodies of Steel Maquette Starfield Lies of P Paradise Killer A bunch of stuff through the Netflix Games program Games I Wanted To Play And Didnt Exoprimal (couldn't get people together) The Tartarus Key (might do that tomorrow but maybe not) El Paso Elsewhere (need more space between Alan Wake and this) Weird West (it's $10 on steam rn but my save is on xbox) Alien Hominid HD (waiting for people to come hang out) Metal Gear Solid 1 re-release (reviews aint great) 24 Killers (didn't seem like the right time (vulnerable)) Wo Long Fallen Dynasty (didn't seem like the right time (infuriating)) I have also cleared 500 written reviews on Backloggd, which can be found here.
  4. Alright! That's it! I feel like when I next attempt this I'll be ready to do it at a more regular clip. Thanks again to everyone who still participates in this. "Diaspora Problems" by Soul Glo "Sometimes, Forever" by Soccer Mommy "Krüller" by Author & Punisher "The Endgame" by Treat "Autofiction" by Suede I do not know anything about Treat. I look at this album cover and figure it's a metal band, as it looks like one. I now do a google search. Well, they're not the kind of metal band I thought they were! And, weirdly, old metal bands have tended to do better in this whole thing than younger ones have (sleep not withstanding (i still occasionally just sit back and remember how much that record bored me (cuz I know other metalheads who like sleep))). Before I hit play it finally occurs to me that cover is sperm approaching a speaker cone. 10-4.
  5. Hi. I'm back again. Things got worse again for a second but that's good now too. This has been on my mind because I said I'd finish it, but I didn't want to say anything until it was all done lest I get anyone else's hopes up. Well, I have. Tomorrow I'll post the last review and maybe in January I'll do some kind of "in 2024 i'll listen to 2023's album of the year" thing. Either way, thanks for your patience. "Diaspora Problems" by Soul Glo "Sometimes, Forever" by Soccer Mommy "Krüller" by Author & Punisher "Autofiction" by Suede I'm vaguely aware of Soul Glo. This is how vaguely: A younger friend of mine that keeps me up to date with music (and in return calls me "unc" lol) who only really rarely likes rock music attempted to put me up on this last winter, but December was when The Problems started so I didn't get around to it. Happy to do so now!
  6. hey i have some indie games to come in here and yell about because toddland 2023 came out so I feel the need to make sure people see these things and that they are not hidden So one of these games is from 2018, and the other released 2023. The 2018 game is called ZeroRanger, and it is the best shootemup of the last ten years. I can't embed links today so you can find that here: https://store.steampowered.com/app/809020/ZeroRanger/ It looks and sounds roughly like this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CSO3jV0Gz_0 It's great! Even if you don't like shootemups you should look at this thing, because it's the best solution to "how do you make these games matter when you can't insert coins?" that I have ever seen. On top of that, at the upper threshhold of learning how to play it, it manages to blend demanding requirements with satisfying rewards that's a bit like if Ghouls & Ghosts was also good to play. I cannot stress how much I recommend ZeroRanger, and if that's all that comes of me posting this stuff, it's worth doing it. So the same team released a new game September 1st and it's a puzzle game with more dedicated storytelling moments in it, and if I'm being honest it's all I've done this evening. It's making a run at having the best style and narrative delivery in a game that I've seen definitely this year, and as far as pixel art goes maybe since Hyper Light Drifter? Which idk if y'all played that but Hyper Light Drifter is one of the games that's made me most satisfied I ever took this hobby up in the first place. So I'm not invoking it lightly. Anyways, it's called Void Stranger, and it's right here! https://store.steampowered.com/app/2121980/Void_Stranger/ EDIT: Actually, here's a little of the old cross promotion! I've uploaded a bunch of new reviews on Backloggd, and the most effusive (and I think longest?) review I have on that website is for Hyper Light Drifter, so, here's that review, and if you click on the user name you can see all the new reviews I posted https://www.backloggd.com/u/appstore/review/704015/
  7. "Sometimes, Forever" by Soccer Mommy "Autofiction" by Suede "Krüller" by Author & Punisher* *pending relisten I am vaguely aware of Suede. My biggest memory of them is at one point I was sitting around with my best friend while we were drinking beers and playing songs, and they have one song where the vocalist goes "lulla-ba-by" and I asked "did they just say lulla-ba-by" and she said no. Then the chorus looped around again, and they did it again, and I pointed right at the speakers while staring at her while she laughed and hid her face. I couldn't tell you what they sounded like.
  8. I played four hours of Bomb Rush Cyberfunk today and here's my first impressions: Holy fuck they really did it. It's a new Jet Set Radio game.
  9. Hi! I haven't posted any reviews all year because December to July was pretty much All Horror, but during that period I was writing reviews and publishing them somewhere no one could find them. Well, I've decided to make that public, and will point you to my account on Backloggd, where I've written over 450 reviews this year. So, if you've ever looked at a review of mine and gone "heh," you can see many, many more over there. EDIT: I should explain my methodology for writing those reviews. I have a random year generator give me eight years from 1990 to 2023 (I've exhausted everything I have to say about games from the 80s) and pick games I have something to say about. So it's not that this week I literally played those eight games, just that when perusing the years I got handed and seeing the games I found, there was a memory or experience with those games close enough to the surface that I felt like sharing it. Also, on that site, I do use a 5 score that I don't use on here, but I only use that to mark what I think the best game of that year is. As for this year, I think this has been a really phenomenal year so far. I'll go ahead and post my reviews of the 2023 games I've played, starting with what I think is the absolute, impossible, unstoppable front runner for Game of the Year, and if you have a PC and haven't played it, you have no excuse. You play video games. It's an expensive hobby. You have $20. I know you do. Go and get... PIZZA TOWER [4] When imagining what games would be like in the future when I was a child, I saw this and not 20,000 more pixelated platformers. It is as explosive and hellish as the best games of this era, the Mario Bros to Cruelty Squad's Duke Nukem. METROID PRIME REMASTERED [3] This might be unfair since (at time of writing I had) a sore throat, a recently broken fever, an ominous rash on both of my hands, a pulled muscle in my foot, and a union of blisters on my feet, but playing this is making me like Hollow Knight even more than I thought I did. MY HOUSE [4] This is a Doom WAD. If you play Doom WADs, go find this thing, DO NOT READ UP ABOUT IT FIRST, and play it. You'll want the pk3. If you have played it, here's my review. REDFALL [3] Or, "Squirrels Sell... but Who's Buying?" This is an important reminder that my 3 means that I do not regret playing this. It does not mean I recommend playing it. I think here I actively kind of don't, unless you really enjoy the idea of a ghost town and can tune out gear comparison. I'm in the first party, I am not in the second party, and upon learning that if a computer crashes a player cannot rejoin your session, I called it a day. STREET FIGHTER 6 [4] It's neat to see Capcom release a Street Fighter that is good, immediately, and with no major pitfalls other than "I'm not sure the battle pass is worth $5." Also, the Evo Top 6 was the best fighting game tournament I've ever seen. BATTLEBIT REMASTERED [4] There's that meme image with Sonic in it, that says "I want shorter games with worse graphics made by people who are paid more to work less and I'm not kidding," and this game feels like we are all trying to make that a reality.
  10. Things are, finally, not so bad. I don't want to talk about it. I want to talk about these records. By the way, if anyone else wants to submit stuff even though the "deadline" is closed, I don't mind. I will say that I'm probably going to relisten to Author & Punisher at some point during this process given that it's been six months since I heard it. "Sometimes, Forever" by Soccer Mommy "Krüller" by Author & Punisher* *pending relisten While it's neat that there's a pseudo-indie rock revival and that it is mostly centered around women, I would be lying if I said the discourse around it has not acted like a hellish barrier keeping me from ever thinking about Phoebe Bridgers without thinking about a culture war for dumbasses over a television show performance. I will do my best to not let that inform me listening to this record.
  11. hey, quick update. I have had a string of terrible happenings to a degree that's kind of hard to parse and I'm still recovering. I will get to this, because I gave my word that I would and I stick to my word, but I don't know when because I don't want to make new memories while things are so bad.
  12. Alright! Let's get started! I know Author & Punisher cuz he's from my city! I listened to this album once last year, around when it came out, and went "this is neat" but I didn't retain more of it. I'm more than happy to give it another shot under any circumstances, and these circumstances will do nicely.
  13. After the Alexis Marshall allegations from Kristin Hayter I had to cash out on that entirely, but I can't navigate that conflict for anyone but myself. I was surprised to see a reply to this (I say "a reply" because I have lawful on ignore) and honestly the timing blows because there is A LOT OF UPHEAVAL happening in my life right now so I will get started on this in January when I'm more in the mood for new things. So, if anyone else wants to participate, go for it! Submission is open late this time!
  14. PENTIMENT [4] A biggish budget Disco Elysium-like with a heavy emphasis on charm and art history headed by the person behind Fallout New Vegas, but also an EXTREMELY deft hand in how it reveals how your build effects what you see. Disco has the bold idea to show you options you can roll on even if your stats won't clear them, to plant more specific seeds about the kind of player you might like to try next time. Pentiment instead at no point reveals what's available for different builds, and those different builds can change on six different factors (so far! I'm only in act 2!). I am in constant awe of what they've done here. High marks, strong recommendation, probably #3 on my top 5 but I could see it passing SIGNALIS.
  15. Speaking of Game Pass, I figured something out yesterday. I went through all the games I played this year through Game Pass and what I scored them at. I've been subscribed all year and have played 32 games (and possibly 34 by the end of the year). I've liked 15 of them. I have the Game Pass Ultimate so I'm paying $15 a month, or $180 a year. To play all the games I played/intend to play this year without game pass, it would have cost me $855. And again, I only liked about half of them, so something like $400-440 would have been on stuff I regretted paying for or actively disliked. EDIT: Another way to look at it is, three games in my top 5 for 2022 came from Game Pass (and that's true whether Pentiment ends up in my top 5 or not) Proof: 1. Elden Ring 2. SIGNALIS (game pass) 3. Splatoon 3 4. As Dusk Falls (game pass) 5. Weird West (game pass)
  16. A hard drive with all my art and videos and music and record masters and everything died this week, so in my next step of my Infinite Plan To Avoid Thinking About That, here's some game reviews. SURVIVOR.IO [2] VAMPIRE SUVIVORS [2] So when a new genre-thing emerges from the muck I feel a misplaced responsibility to give it a shot, and I don't feel like that's paid off less than it has with these two. It doesn't help that both developers are pretty open about how they're designed to be addictive and exploitative, though at least the Vampire Survivors guy only wants to eat your time. It's unsettling to me, on top of it being basically a simulated action game. Whatever. I'm not the audience, and I worry that they don't respect their audience, but I feel divested from trying to talk about that. SIGNALIS [4] In a year where Elden Ring doesn't come out, this is the game of the year. It's an instant classic survival horror game that's moved me to awe, wonder, and a little bit of the old existential dread. Fabulous, clever, confident. I do not want to talk about what happens in it. I want people to play it. Highest recommendation. I have four additional games I intend to play this year: Pentiment (just got past class creation, it's super charming), Warhammer Darktide (cuz friends), Hardship Spacebreaker (might not get to this one) and the graphical release of Dwarf Fortress (cuz if I can't get in once they have a tutorial and graphics then I'm not gonna get into it).
  17. I didn't forget! There's like no chance I'll listen to them all in 2022 this year! Woohoo! Rules: First Come, First Serve. If you nominate two, I'll listen to zero. No guarantees that my review will be positive. If someone suggests your album I'll ask the both of you if you have another album you'd rather I review. First Come First Serve still applies. This year, I haven't been listening to a lot of new music because I've been trying to close up loose ends as I prepare for a real big transition next year. So I didn't listen to a lot of the big stuff this year, and I have a big list of stuff I meant to hear from this year. However, in lieu of knowing for sure, the new album I've listened to the most is "God's Country" by Chat Pile. Over the last two years I've had my eternal fill of noise rock where the vocalists just tell you they suck over and over like it's profound soul-searching, only to later just be telling on themselves. Fool me once, etc. Chat Pile hits those same veins of dark atmosphere and tension, but through just looking at the world around them and not just roleplaying as a guy who pretends he sucks. On top of that, I feel they're the best in class of the Jesus Lizard lineage, a style of rock band that mostly annoys me. Show me what you got! Please. Please show me what you got.
  18. HYPER DEMON [4] mm now that's a tasty video game. It's a first person arcade game. It's the most visually overwhelming game I've played since Polybius. EXTREME EPILEPSY WARNING: It Looks Like This when you're good at it. I'm not good at it. I might never be. I'm so glad it exists. RESTARTED YAKUZA LIKE A DRAGON [4] yakuza good i like SLICE & DICE 2.0 [3] I didn't know this game was working on updates at any point. Turns out it just completely remade every part of the game, to like a sequel's amount of depth and changes, and didn't charge me for it again! Woohoo! But my save wouldn't transport over for some mysterious reason which means I have lost everything I had unlocked before. Boo. Also all the fun builds I exploited for easy wins are completely removed. The three score is entirely because of that. (quick scale reminder: 1 = hate, 2 = regret, 3 = don't regret, 4 = love). Gameplay wise, it's a 4. Now for a more surface level explanation: Slice & Dice is a run based roguelike where the player has five characters with different classes (agility, strength, defense, healing, magic) and each character class has dice. So like a defender's dice will have Shield 2, Shield 1, etc. The trick is, there's 100 different character classes, separated among levels (5 of each type for level 1, then 8 of each for levels 2 & 3), and only limited choices on which ones you get. So, it's really hard to have runs go the same way. On top of that, there's 354 different kinds of items to get that all provide different modifications to the characters. There's also 16 different play modes, that all play extremely differently, and leaderboards. This game's like $4 I think? It's on phones, it's got a demo, try it out, it's sick. SCORN [2] This is so close to being so cool, but I can't recommend it and I don't think I'm going to finish it. And yet for all the complaints I have about it, the game is called Scorn, so I suppose I don't know what I expected. It's the first game that's ever made me seriously consider trying Pathologic 2. If you like Survival Horror, with a game that checkpoints about as often as you found save points in Silent Hill 1 or Resident Evil, you may like Scorn. If you like Pathologic, well, I didn't know anyone on this board liked that game and you should know the comparison point is specifically in the combat and not all the RPG parts.
  19. it is still pretty weird but they've been owned by the same company since 2012 when they sold to CBS Interactive
  20. Well there's nothing that springs out as egregious in the build, though I should say that when a guide like fextralife says an enemy is weak to something like bleed, that only counts when the effect fires and not towards overall damage done. If they're weak to something more elemental like fire or holy, then every swing is extra damage. I would second waiting to summon until phase 2, because the main things the wolves will do in phase one are hit the wrong targets and get crushed by the chandeliers, so it's not really worth it. and yeah there's just a few spells where if you get hit you get zonked, and that'll be true for every boss pretty much for the duration of the game. The way to think about leveling up is that so when you're in some big fucked up late game cave, you can still die in like three hits but if you don't level vigor it'll be one or two. I would also say that this is a game that really rewards rolling towards your opponent as a common solution to attacks. For instance, with Rennala, the homing glintstone would do me in until I started just rolling into them instead of to the side. Every boss has attacks where rolling towards them is the better solution, even if it's completely counter intuitive. And who knows, maybe this boss just has a mental block on you. That happens too. During my first playthrough, I genuinely thought I wasn't going to beat it entirely because of the Godskin Duo. I died something like 47 times to them alone. I cried about it once or twice. So it could be that it's just time for you to be in the trenches now, and by the time you get to some other boss that lives in people's nightmares you'll just be like "what was the big deal about this fight" and get it on your first or second try. Regardless: keep at it, you'll get there, and remember, there is no such thing as cheesing bosses.
  21. Since I have no idea what your build is or stats are, or what you're currently going up against, I'm going to have to make some assumptions. It sounds like the expectation is that once you hit a certain level it's smooth sailing for the duration of the game. I'm sorry to say that that's not really how these games work. There's not like a level you reach where suddenly things stop doing damage and you can take twenty hits in a boss fight. Every fight requires constant attention, and especially every boss fight. I will also say that the arc of what leveling does to your character is a lot more subtle than the effects of upgrading your weapons. In your post you say you have pretty good gear, which I'm interpreting to mean that the stats on your armor are good, and that can help for sure. I would make sure your weapons are staying as upgraded as possible. That can even be a higher priority than stats on occasion. In general the advice for Elden Ring is that, whenever you hit a wall, go explore and do something else and come back later. There's multiple ways around situations. Maybe the boss you're trying to do right now isn't necessary to clear the game. Like, I'm going to pick a name out of a hat here, but judging from talking about how the recommended level for clearing the boss you're struggling with is 40, I'm going to guess the boss you're stuck on is Radahn. The good news is, you do not necessarily need to beat Radahn to progress in the game! Now, if you're hoping to complete a specific sidequest, then yeah, Radahn's gotta go down. But Radahn can wait until as late as you like. So yeah. Without knowing what may or may not be going wrong with your gear or build or any synergies between the two, and the pure guesswork of thinking you're stuck at Radahn- an extremely common roadblock btw- I would suggest you just go explore and check out something else. Every other FromSoft game- be it souls or kings field or sekiro or bloodborne- are games where you're on a Quest. Think of Elden Ring instead as an Adventure.
  22. SPLATOON 3 [4] 2nd place for game of the year. It's my first time playing a splatoon so I can't speak at all to the iterative nature of it, or how derivative it may or may not be of the other games. What I can say is that it's the most fun I've had playing a competitive shooters in years, for two reasons. First, the gyro controls. Using the gyro controls are brilliant in this game because no gun is precise enough that it's a serious detriment. Everything fires in spreads and unpredictable patterns, so just putting the crosshairs near the target will do, and gyro controls let you aim faster than a stick. Second, I hadn't realized until putting 10 hours into how much I am done with Headshots as a mechanic. Splatoon has no headshots, so you have to think entirely about the encounter as an encounter, of exchanges between your weapons and tools with another set of weapons and tools. I prefer that. Great game. MIDNIGHT FIGHT EXPRESS HAS THE SINGLE STRANGEST BUG I'VE EVER SEEN [n/a] On the Xbox, after you make your initial save the game hangs on a "Loading Save Data" screen. It will do this until you change your profile picture. I have an old Xbox 360 profile picture I'm afraid I'll lose access to if I change my profile picture, so I guess I'll never play Midnight Fight Express. Oh well! WEIRD WEST [4] Currently my 3rd place for Game of the Year. I've been going out of my comfort zone a lot in the last month or so and this is part of that- this is a weird hodgepodge of a bunch of genres that feels as much like an immersive sim as something like Crusader No Remorse. It's on game pass, so for game pass havers this is currently the game I'd give a strongest recommendation to because it's a bit of a hard sell at $40, being a game that has no immediate comparisons. It's interesting and it seems long as hell tho, so it's most likely worth the money, but I wouldn't have tried it at all without game pass.
  23. I'm firmly on the anti side. Briefly, I find their storytelling to be largely at odds with the game they make, and not in some fun intentional way. I think most of sony's auteur-marketed stuff suffers from this, where these people make games about human misery because their work environment is openly hellish, and you make what you know. It causes their stories to ring hollow to me, especially in the case of TLOU where the writing team is making Cormac McCarthy's The Road Where I Miss My Family Because I'm Here 90 Hours A Week and the animators are making Super Manhunt 3 EX Plus Alpha. I feel both of those mindsets are inflicted upon these professionals by their environment, and I can't get down with it. I feel the praise those games get can be most attributed to the games industry dragging it's feet with developing dramas or anything that is not action movie pastiche. As such, they are conversed about in a hyperbolic fashion that's often not that connected to what's actually happening in those games.
  24. a story about my alma mater In 2014 SDSU had two kidnapping attempts a few weeks apart. The night after the second one, while waiting for a bus, I sat on the curb and listened to some dipshit kid give an interview to a local reporter about how women need to stay in groups and watch what they dress. later that week a third kidnapping attempt happened literally directly in front of my brother, who was only on campus to give me a ride and was idling in his car on the top floor of a parking garage. that one didn't make the news because it got classified as a domestic dispute. so all of this is disappointing but i can't really claim its surprising
  25. among all the move creators you just listed I'd also like to give a shout out to irbou, who's impeccable work makes it possible to have Actually Good Looking Shoot Wrestling in Fire Pro. For some reason the board wont let me embed a link right now, so here's a link to his workshop page. https://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561198001863177/myworkshopfiles/?appid=564230 Also, FYI, if your number of downloaded moves starts hovering near 3500 (you laugh but it's easier to get up there than you think), it could corrupt your save, so be sure to prune aggressively.
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