Lamp, broken circa 1988

So for people not in the loop, Street Fighter 6 got rebooted a few years ago after some kind of disastrous internal showing that cost the head of the entire fighting game department their job. So that teaser being a big nothingburger with a cheap logo is also representative of how direly on fire that game appears to be. I wish them the best, but honestly Capcom's been on such a winning streak that they're about due for something to fall on its face.

I was going to shitpost about metal album covers and mental illness or something, but I have an actual thing to say here: maybe the problem is that you're looking at Hollow Knight like it's a game about fighting when it's a game about platforming. Think about the average Sonic The Hedgehog boss fight. Present a singular gimmick, it has three moves, learn when you can hit them, do it three-to-seven times. Not a lot happening there. In contrast, Hollow Knight- which is a platformer first- makes Platforming boss fights where the boss is treated as a platform that aggresses upon the player in ways that allows strategic thought and playstyle nuances in the platforming. If you look at it in terms of games where you have to stay rooted on the ground, then maybe Hollow Knight falls short. On the other hand, Hollow Knight solves the problem of Platformer Boss Fights in just spectacular fashion. That's what's interesting about the combat. Not that it's a game with a deep Monster Hunter moveset, but rather a game with Highly Tuned Sports Car finesse in its movement options, and boss fights that rise to meet that movement style and challenge how well you've learned to move in this precision machine.

DRAGON QUEST XI S [4] I think one of my favorite parts of Dragon Quest is when you finally have your Setup and are just walking around demolishing everyone, because it both feels like you've broken the game and that it's the only actual way to get anything done. In old games, what I used to do was basically have two characters with Muster Strength (which takes a turn to charge a double damage hit) and then I have them alternate attacks and charges, and then my other two party members work to keep them alive. In this game, I have one person who swings for like 700 damage a turn at a high mana cost, two characters that keep feeding them mana, and then one character does cheap group heals the whole time. I would say that DQXI is probably the best one to start with because it's both accessible and high quality (I have it fourth on my all time list), and while it doesn't break into all time greats category of DQ games, that's not a fair metric. Strong recommend. Ready to move on to Yakuza Like a Dragon after an RPG break! HOLLOW KNIGHT - DID A WHOLE BUNCH OF STUFF So idk if I stated this but I got pretty far in this game on Xbox, hit a boss that stomped the shit out of me, and decided "I need to play this without latency" and got it on PC. I am now further than where I was when I stopped, having done plenty of things I felt were impossible to do on console. This is still the best metroidvania, and maybe the best 2D game. In fact, impromptu, here's an off the top of my head list of the best games ever made that I've played from 1 to until I get to Hollow Knight. Tetris 99 Hyper Light Drifter Mother 3 Quadrilateral Cowboy Kentucky Route Zero Hollow Knight It's That Good. RETRO BOWL ON SWITCH [4] So I bought this wondering if it'd be harder to play this on pad than on phone, and actually it turns out that I'm just great at retro bowl lol. In my original save it took me like 9 seasons to make the Retro Bowl. On the switch it took 2. Then I went back to phone, started a new save, and got it in my first year. So, yeah. I think I'm just good at Retro Bowl. GEARS 5 - ACT 3 It's worth noting that, as I've played all these games co-op and we started playing them to get away from the idea of doing anything with an open world theme because I am officially sick of open world games (and yes, that does make me concerned about Elden Ring, but I'm hoping the mystery I'll have from not learning anything about it will make up the distance here), my friend has been driving in all the open world segments because I refuse to. So, with that in mind, I'm having a good time! It's also got this thing where all the side missions are HARD AS HELL and that makes them worth doing because the encounters are so fun, even if they're really really stressful a lot of the time.

Checking back in with some more Indian wrestling greatness! To my mind the two best wrestlers in Khali's fed are Sardar Singh (their HHH/Jarrett stand in only he uses a goddamn rifle as his prop weapon) and Badshah Khan (who just turned face but is occasionally a sickening crowbar). Well, they just had a singles match and guess what: it's great.

GAMING UPDATE!! DRAGON QUEST XI S - GOD THE BOSSFIGHTS IN THESE GAMES SOMETIMES I am currently at Octagonia in the second act of the game, and have failed to beat the bosses of this area three times, the third after spending multiple hours grinding. It wouldn't be so bad if they gave me a chance to heal at all between the boss fights. It's just an incredibly difficult pair of encounters and it's slowly draining my will to see this through before Elden Ring hits. STARTED UP DEMONS OF ASTEBORG AGAIN I'm at a point where, now that pixel art has stopped attempting subversion and is just nostalgia, anything going for "JUST LIKE THE OLD DAY" rings like absolute bullshit to me. The reason this gets a pass with me is because it was designed to actually run on Genesis hardware, and that kind of commitment to invocation is more respectable than "we look like earthbound cuz you'll pay us." The game itself is fine. REPLAYING DISCO ELYSIUM ANYWAYS Started watching a friend play it and was like "This counts for my playthrough!" then two days passed where they didn't and hey look I'm on day 2. This is still the best Actual RPG. I TRIED THREE INDIE GAMES AND DROPPED TWO AND THEN FINISHED ONE Game Pass is great. The first game I tried was Death's Door, which I refunded last year because I knew it was going to be a Game Pass game, deep in my bones. I fought two bosses and then decided I didn't like it much for free either. The second game I tried was Unsighted, which has been discussed as "Like Hyper Light Drifter. It's a bit like telling someone to watch Palm Springs because it's "Like The Lighthouse." Fell off this at the first lore dump text log. Well maybe the game I finished was good? Let's see! UNPACKING [1] I don't know how to explain why I hate this without either oversharing my mental illness or breaking the politics rule, so I will leave it at "I don't care about rich people." BEAT GEARS OF WAR 4 [3] Current Gears of War rankings Judgment. Best encounters, best shooting, tightest controls, best pace of storytelling, least amount of weird attempts at poignancy. Genuinely might be the best 360 game. Gears of War 2. Horde Mode would win if it was a separate entry. The campaign is fine, weighed down by the late 2000s obsession with "Can a game make you cry?!". Deeply improved gunplay puts it over... Gears of War 1. While 2 gets the edge for the massive wall of quality of life improvements (You can't run and reload in this! That is wild!), the encounter design is still absolutely razor sharp, and the attempt at poignancy is not some heart strings shit but a cold, icy threat. Your cool commander gets extremely fucking executed and then the killer looks at you before you run for your lives, and that's how you meet the final boss. Great, heavy, propulsive. Gears of War 4. What's good about this mainly exists to talk about what's bad about Gears of War 3. So let me do some positives and then I will dump. What this game does mechanically in the gap between 3 and 4 is put a lot of attention to moving in cover. This is a great starting point for a studio looking to get their hands on a franchise and make it Their Own. After pretty awful first & second acts, the pace of the game hits its sweet spot in the middle as you start dealing with The Actual Enemy instead of boring fascist robots asking you to please obey while they shoot you. Why are we still doing that. Anyways, once the game advances into dealing with freaks instead of robots, that emphasis on movement shines and turns this game into an excellent horror action game in the same vein as like the recent Resident Evil games. It's not going to actively disturb anyone, and it has nothing to say outside of Parent Power Fantasy stuff, but it's an extremely fun, gross Uncharted with bodysnatchers and hell weather. Pleasant surprise. This being second from the bottom is because it has to be here, as there's a WIDE quality gulf between this and... Gears of War 3, which is actively bad. Where Gears 4 is made by people who love Uncharted 2, Gears 3 is a game made by active competitors who were scared shitless by it. It leaks confidence everywhere, from UI design to "humanization," and this culminates in the encounters and the truly mentally tapped attempts to make those encounters more varied. Gears 4 is excellent as a game where you shoot fucked up monsters who don't have to take cover. Gears 3 croaks every time it moves away from Locust encounters and towards floating monsters and shit with weird tentacles that makes cover not count, or the attempts to make big monster fights happen. It is a drag, and I would have done exactly what Epic did with the franchise if we got put under pressure and stayed coal. Oh, hey, fun fact, coal actually has nothing to do with the creation of diamonds. Went to look up how that actually works, and it doesn't. On to Gears 5, the 6th Gears of War game!

Who's got a game update? I've got a game update. DARK SOULS 2 SCHOLAR OF THE FIRST SIN - DRANGLEIC CASTLE, HOWEVER... ...I might be done with this game. Not because of anything they did, but because a Remote Code Execution glitch was found, and they shut off the servers, and I'm not confident I'm going to beat this before Elden Ring anymore because I bet they're fixing Elden Ring first and then maaaaaybe they'll patch the old games, and I like the messages and bloodstains too much to consider playing it offline. So, I might be done. It's up to them. DRAGON QUEST XI S - I HAVE ALL THE MAGIC DOODADS This last weekend has been The Shits, and to offset it I spent a lot of time with my switch reassuring myself I wasn't having an actual heart attack by staring at Dragon Quest and doing a bunch of shit in it. I think I put 12 hours into this game this weekend? It's good, but it's Dragon Quest, so you probably know if you want to play this, and if you're not sure, go get a 3DS and the remake of Dragon Quest VII, which I think might be the best game in the series. GEARS OF WAR 4 - WEIRDLY CONFLICTED? So I just got done with Judgment, which if you missed that, here's my review: Judgment rips. This game has, majority, not ripped. The robot enemies are hideously boring, like a focus test group learning about the Vex and seeing if they can make Extremely Boring FIghts work in their game too. They cannot. And yet I have reached the point of the game where there's a bunch of monsters everywhere? Which was my biggest gripe about Gears 3? Well turns out that was just the fault of the people who did Gears 3, because so far all the monster killing shit in 4 has been great fun. The zone is actually spooky, the setup is disturbing but urgent, and the combat encounters shift from close to far range and it introduces a bunch of mechanics that both make cover strategically destructable and punishes you for either relying too heavily on that cover, or not prioritizing that cover the right way. Basically, all the cover that can explode can also turn into an enemy if the wrong enemy gets hit but not killed. And it'll do that for the entire room. So if you can't find him, you have to pick between reducing the cover before he gets set off, or finding him and hopefully having an easier fight with more options. This is Good Stuff. This is the thing Gears 4 is doing best. I hear in Gears 5 they make JD a villain and this is also an extremely good idea. WINDJAMMERS 2 [4] Gorgeous! And not, like, visually. Visually I think it's kind of a mess and I think the usual dotemu style of comic drawing does this game dirty because the lines make the characters look bad at certain angles. Mechanically, though! This thing fuckin Goes. It took a two button game to a four button game, and made those other two buttons such seizmic changes to the pace of the game that I just love it. There's actual mixups! The mixups that previously existed have another layer to them! There's incentives to reading player behavior! They added a bar, and it does both Offensive and Defensive stuff, and both options are HUGE comeback mechanics, but only if you know how to use them! Just a delightful action game.

already got enough for another LIST UPDATE DARK SOULS 2: SCHOLAR OF THE FIRST SIN- IRON KEEP In my last session I encountered two of the most powerful feelings souls games can offer you. On the upswing, I defeated The Duke's Dear Freja- a boss that has a long and arduous trek to withstand on the way there- on my first try. I felt fuckin' so sick and strong. Then I went to the last of area of the first half of the game, the Iron Keep, and have so far died to one mandatory phantom 25 times. This may take a while. GEARS OF WAR JUDGMENT- FINISHED I left the campaign my friend and I started last year to beat all the Gears games off my list cuz I haven't been counting multiplayer games. Judgment is the best game in the series and it isn't even close. It's the gameplay peak, it's got big stupid action movie pacing, and only really stumbles with the final boss, which has been the problem of every Gears game aside from Gears 1. Strongest possible recommendation. GEARS OF WAR 4- PLAYED ACT 1 A great first twenty minute flashback that's so far been followed with a pretty annoying game. So the main observation I took from Gears 3 is that is from a group of devs that shat their pants at Uncharted 2. The main observation so far in 4, a game from a studio that was founded to keep making Gears games, is that it is made by people who respect the Uncharted games so much, they made their main character half-an-uncharted. The title screen is literally just his face. The dev effort went into making moving feel better, and every part of it does. However, since Judgment is the black sheep, every single improvement Judgment made to the gameplay is now gone. I feel a great sense of dread about finishing this. THE ANACRUSIS- HOLY SHIT IT'S A CATASTROPHE Tried through the gamepass free trial thing. I know it's a game preview, but like... is this going to help? Is there any chance this helps this game? It is performance wise a mess, but it's worse to play and it's grating to boot. Like ok, Shatner Star Trek Left4Dead sounds great, but when it's just people talking in those outfits and then you are playing the grossest feeling action game? It's not going to do enough to cover the gap there. I hope there's so much ground covered between now and release, because the state it's in on consoles is completely unacceptable. DRAGON QUEST XI S - I'M PLAYING IT RIGHT NOW It's proven: the best way to play any Dragon Quest game is before bed. Just play until you reach the next save point!

LIST UPDATE CRUELTY SQUAD- FINISHED I opted for the first ending here as the process towards the true ending- which a friend already showed me anyways- requires me to go headlong against a major phobia and maybe some day but not right now! This is still the unquestionable 2021 Game of the Year and any conversation that doesn't include it isn't worth hearing out! Play Cruelty Squad! DARK SOULS 2: SCHOLAR OF THE FIRST SIN- BRIGHTSTONE COVE TSELDORA Running a Cleric Miracle build, Primary is the Blacksmith Hammer +4 (it's fun), offhand is the Disc Chime, aspiring to get Sunlight Weapon. I've done two of the four great souls (or whatever they're called?) and it's honestly the furthest I've ever been in a souls game. I'm aspiring to beat this before Elden Ring comes out, especially now that I know Kirby is out a fuckin Month Later. I've made it to the Iron Keep, but there's an invader by the front door that is just kicking my fuckin ass so I'm doing everything else I have available. I'm skipping a lot of optional bosses, and just trying to get down the main line as fast as possible. DRAGON QUEST XI S- JUST GOT TO GONDOLIA This is a major landmark for me, as my first playthrough ended shortly after here on account of my primary PS4 had this cool thing where it would spit discs out all the time. So I'm almost done dragging my feet through stuff I've already done! I imagine the pace will pick up much faster after I'm done here. HOLLOW KNIGHT- DRAGGING MY FEET The Soul Master is my next obvious boss, and I don't want to do it, so I made progress in all these other games instead lol

Alright, time to stop running. "Ultrapop" by The Armed "The Powers That Be" by Pharoah "Jubilee" by Japanese Breakfast "Inside (The Songs)" by Bo Burnham I am not known as a great appreciator of stand-up comedy, or musical comedy, or musical theater, or pianos. I know who Bo Burnham is. I had no intention of watching Inside. So, my approach here is going to be kind of academic: can I get the same thing out of just engaging with the soundtrack? Whether I want to do this or not, I'm a man of my word, so it's time to find out.

Here is my 2022 Gaming Resolution. I have a list of games I wanted to beat last year that I didn't get around to, and honestly there's not a lot of games coming out this year I'm expecting to hold my attention. So! Here is the list of games I am aspiring to finish in the year 2022. Cruelty Squad (at a point I stopped playing it and started watching it, so now I'm going back to it to actually complete it) Dark Souls II Scholar of the First Sin Demons of Asteborg Disco Elysium (second full playthrough, physical build) Dragon Quest XI S Final Fantasy 7 (started a playthrough because there's been a lot of AI Upres procedures done on the prerendered maps and I want to see that) The rest of the Gears of War franchise (currently playing Judgment. short: best game in the series) Hollow Knight (started over on PC with a less latent display) Hitman 3 L.A. Noire (timed with the Action Button review) One full game of Old World Tres-Bashers ULTRAKILL (this one is the one that worries me) Yakuza Like A Dragon Now, I'm allowing myself leeway because there are some new games I am 100% getting (Elden Ring, Kirby, probably Splatoon?) and some indie games that are in various states of "when it's done" that if they say When I'm running full speed to (Radio The Universe, UFO 50, Skin Deep, Bomb Rush Cyberfunk, and Dread Delusion most notably). So for most of the year when I post a review of something, if I reviewed it once before, I'm going to specify that I just beat it and these are my final thoughts with it. WIsh me luck lol

Disco Elysium works like Fallout in that it's a point and click RPG, but there is absolutely no combat. As simply as possible, it's a large variety of different skill checks and dialog. However, it's exceptionally well thought out (dialog decisions can play into other dialog down the line, and your character build makes completely different avenues of the story available) and it's all exceptionally written dialog. I think it is the best work of fiction available in games, and there is no close contender. Strongest possible recommendation. That being said, DO NOT SHOW DISCO ELYSIUM TO A CHILD. It is, subject matter wise, EXTREMELY intense.

A reminder that submissions close on New Year's day! "Ultrapop" by The Armed "The Powers That Be" by Pharoah "Jubilee" by Japanese Breakfast I have heard of Japanese Breakfast but couldn't name a song. A cursory google search reveals that they're not Japanese, but instead Korean. I also think they did the soundtrack for the video game Sable? What a great sentence for anyone from the 90s. "The Sable game has a soundtrack by Japanese Breakfast." The wikipedia genre pile lists "indie rock" and what are basically five synonyms. I think that's about as much as I can get out of this part of the review.

Some reviews, starting with a re-score! SOLAR ASH [2] I quit it when it introduced a mechanic I had no interest in dealing with, in a section where I hated the narrative angle and experienced the second most frustrating dialog exchange in the game. I'm beginning to feel like the narrative direction is the fault of the publisher, because Annapurna's brand is like NPR Devolver Digital and it cant just put out a cool action game. So between this, 12 Minutes, and Last Exit, Annapurna has burned all its good will and has nothing really to show for it. I used to take note of games they were putting out and now it's going to be an uphill battle to get me to check out anything they release. GEARS OF WAR [3] GEARS OF WAR 2 [4] GEARS OF WAR 3 [2] A friend of mine have been replaying the Gears of War series kinda just to do it. Well, not "kinda just to do it." I've hit this crisis point with game design where I am finished with more genres than not. I don't want to aim down sights anymore, I don't like open world games, I don't like battle royales, I don't want to compare numbers on items, and I don't want anything runbased or procedural. You may notice that's 90% of video games now! Yeah! I'm in trouble! I just want to play a game with some levels in it! Levels were cool! So from that we talked each other into playing all the Gears games. -Gears 1 in my mind was A Classic but there's so many quality of life things they added in 2 that I forgot were not in 1 that I can't regard it the same way anymore. At the same time, Gears 1 is also the game that gave us the camera for Every Modern Video Game. From Sony Prestige Games to those awful Batman games, to Final Fantasy 7 Remake, Gears of War is the fundamental building block. How it swings its camera when your in control to point out the next spectacle is how every single game works now. It's easy to shit on Gears for being monochromatic, but remember that among the people singing the praises of Gears' camera usage was Hironobu Sakaguchi, which he adopted for Lost Odyssey to showcase how to map that dynamic camera usage onto a JRPG. Gears of War is phenominally important to every extant video game, but it's not the easiest thing to go back to. -Gears 2 is a for real action game masterpiece. It doesn't push anything forward with camera usage or anything (which will bite it in the ass later) but what it does do is fix up the engine of the actual gameplay. It is a gameplay focused sequel. Plus, Horde Mode. I would suggest Gears 2 Horde Mode, if standalone, is the unquestionable best game of that whole decade. -Gears 3 is bad. When we started playing it my friend and I kept remarking "wow I remember none of this but I remember beating it!" It turns out that if you make two cool games about firefights in heavy cover, and then make game 3 a game where you run around and fight monsters in open areas all the time, it's kind of a drag! It's like you got this sports car and use it mainly to go get groceries. It's also weirdly prescient of the direction games were going in. In the intervening time between Gears 2 and 3, Uncharted 2 happened. Uncharted 2 ate Gears' lunch as a spectacle delivery system and started touching on the idea of using Gears' camera tech to play at dramatic gravitas. As a result, Gears 3 tries to go for dramatic moments and uncomfortable moments more heavily. It fails. It fails really hard. All the time. It fails so bad that Epic ends up going "well shit, maybe we can compete with minecraft" and stops making single player games. POLYBIUS [4] From the Steam Page: "The inspiration for POLYBIUS was an old urban legend about a strange, abstract, psychedelic arcade game that was supposedly released for a brief time in the 1980s. According to the legend people who played the game experienced strange and rather unpleasant psychological reactions after becoming addicted to it. There was talk of the CIA and Men in Black. Of course the legendary game has never actually been found but - especially with the advent of VR - we thought it might be fun to make a game inspired by the old legend. Our version is intended only to have positive effects on the minds of its users though!" It works. It's also not for people with epilepsy. It's also from the Space Giraffe guy. TETR.IO [4] This is one of those experiences where it really puts into perspective how far behind 90% of the game industry is with the internet and how to use it. This is a Browser Based Tetris, with amazing netcode, unlimited size player lobbies, multiple leaderboards for either Ranked Competitive, 40 Line sprints, or High Score runs, and easily accessible replays for everything where all you have to do is copy a link and look at it. Setting up a lobby lets you customize everything from how the pieces are randomly seeded (there's like six different algorithms) to exact decimal points on how gravity accelerates over time. It also has serverwide events that you can watch unfold on their official twitch account if you don't think you're a big enough tetris badass to compete. This is all by one person. Oh and the music's great. Like literally everything about this package is one of the best games I've ever seen in my life, and it's a free browserbased game by one person. Lord, they're running behind. = = = btw just a reminder but Play Cruelty Squad. I am watching a lot of game of the year stuff come up where Cruelty Squad isn't even being mentioned and its starting to drive me insane because the gap between it and every other video game released in the last few years runs the risk of endangering the entire industry. I could scream about it for another five hours here but I will stop and just say Play Cruelty Squad, It's The Real Game of the Year.

Well. 0-day serverside java exploit that allows easy remote code execution. Entirely serverside, no way to fix it on your end, no way to even know what you might be using that uses it. This is the Big One. https://apnews.com/article/technology-business-lifestyle-software-apple-inc-aed3cc628fc602079b100757974c8f01 I want to scream, but not in like an angry or stressed way? It's like finding out a river was actually an Old God, and your town is about to undergo the most incredible changes. Your foolish need for water has scarred thy DNA, and when the agents come all they have to do is hum a little tune and your flesh and bones will stretch and cancer, and open a little hatch to your mind. It is about that bad of an exploit. Good luck, and get baked goods for your IT people because they're gonna have a rotten December.

at the same time that is devon larratt and it's frankly a miracle more people haven't swung on him

Artist Lingua Ignota has released a detailed timeline of her abuse at the hands of Daughters lead singer Alexis Marshall from 2019-2021. I'm posting this here because I know there's a few fans of Daughters around these parts and I figured they would want to know.

I wrote some big reviews and then deleted them like a dope so you get tiny ones. SOLAR ASH [3] Love playing it, writing is bad enough to make me struggle to recommend it, hope you like hams saying hammy sci-fi shit MONCAGE [4] Clever, somewhere between Gorogoa and The Room (in puzzle construction only, not a horror game) PANZER DRAGOON ON SWITCH [2] My fault, didn't notice a Performance Mode until after I beat it ARREST OF A STONE BUDDHA [3] Genuinely not sure how you're supposed to play this on normal difficulty. Good moody sad gritty action-adventure game DARK SOULS 2 SCHOLAR OF THE FIRST SIN [4] I'm sick also just a reminder in the run up to the game awards and people thinking about their game of the year; you all need to play Cruelty Squad. I would buy copies if I weren't so broke, that's how serious I am.

I need a distraction! 4AM reviews! "Ultrapop" by The Armed "The Powers That Be" by Pharoah So! The Armed! This'll be my fifth time listening to this this year I think? After the first time I listened to it I was kind of bothered by the cover for reasons that aren't worth getting into, and then I went and talked to some friends of mine and heard theories and evidence of things that this band might actually be- namely the idea that this is all the brainchild of Kurt Ballou, Converge guitarist and probably the best rock producer alive. However we got there, I like a bunch of songs on here already, but this'll be the first time I sit down and do nothing but listen to it. That'll be fun! Oh uh it's good workout music btw, that is what I mean by that.

El Hijo Del Santo Akira Hokuto Stan Hansen Eddie Guerrero The Destroyer Shin'ya Hashimoto Yumiko Hotta Jushin Thunder Liger Bryan Danielson Fit Finlay it fucking kills me to not be able to put any battlarts people on here but I can't justify putting Ishikawa over anyone here.

One of my friends released an album that got a glowing 8.0 review on Pitchfork today that it absolutely deserves. You can find it here however you'd like to find it: https://dearlaika.nnatapes.com/pluperfect-mind

I posted this in the Wrestling Machine thread because I had that open but meant to put it here! Oops! ==== So first, let's explain how I found this. A friend of mine asks a quasi-joke question, where they ask who's the best wrestler from Italy. I then realize I dont know anything about Italian wrestling. So I go on wikipedia to look up italian wrestlers, and the name Ted Boy Marino catches my eye. Turns out he is Italian, but he was a big star in Brazil in the 60s and 70s. And from that Wikipedia, I learn the name for wrestling shows in Brazil, which is Telecatch. I was waiting until I found a match I thought had majority good things about it before I shared this discovery of Brazilian Wrestling, and here it is. This youtube account has a lot of videos from the personal archive of one of the participants, Renato Dias (the beanpole in yellow). Belo is the man in the incredible screenshot. Please also take note of the canvas and apron of this show, which is called Gigantes do Ringue, which I will be digging through for the rest of the year.

EDIT: LOL WRONG THREAD. Check over in the Wrestling Not From Now Thread

Well, uh, I guess I'll get started and maybe that'll lead people to start submitting things? I know nothing about Pharoah. You, you are surprised. A cursory google leads me to a wikipedia page that says this is rooted in European Power Metal. I'm hoping that's just a copywriter from a long time ago doing a reductive job. also it says this is the first album from this band in like 9 years, so that's cool! Here we go!

TRES-BASHERS [3] Adorable NES styled platformer where you are a tiny rat hunting freaky cryptids and trying to recover all your cool cryptid notes and save your partner in cryptid-hunting from the head of the Cryptid gang, Sasquatch. Usually don't go for pixel retro stuff anymore but this one's got such a powerful premise that I dont regret checking it out at all. CROSSCODE [3] I was having a good time- not a great time- until in one of the dungeons all of the enemies just suddenly started not following the rules of the rest of the game. After failing that encounter ten times and nearly throwing a controller (which I literally haven't done since Super Mario Galaxy) I went into the difficulty options and cranked down the enemy damage to the absolute bottom to keep going. It's fine, but it's uneven. I want to see where the story is going. SUPER AUTO PETS [3] It's free and it's a super paired down Auto Chess, and a few years ago I attempted to explain Auto Chess in here so just read that and then imagine it's like 1/5th as much complicated. METROID DREAD [2] Here's a variety of snippy things I have said about this game to other people. If you would have asked me on saturday night I would have told you this is the most disappointed I've been in a game. congratulations to Cruelty Squad for winning Game of the Year in a fuckin walk i've been wondering who this game is for and I'm starting to think the answer is "the developers" at least the speed runs will look nuts Five hours in and I've been having a miserable time. I was looking for an eerie adventure, and instead have recieved hyper-repetitive platinum action with PG horror elements. If you played Doom Eternal and disliked The Marauder, imagine there's Three Different Kinds of Marauder and you'll have a sense of what you're in for. The combat is repetitive, the animation is so fast that it looks like ads for mobile games, the one-hit-kills from the EMMI aren't even like exciting when they happen because Nintendo wont show anything graphic, but they also won't relent with how fucked up they are to deal with so you'll see the same three death animations over and over... Not having fun! Regret buying this! Wouldn't recommend! EDIT: srsly tho Cruelty Squad is the game of the year, the snippy part is emphasizing just how much better it is than everything else that's happened this year

yeah i asked for a picture of a handstand and also got a person